The error of _Rationalism_, at once the brother and the enemy of orthodoxy, is of the same nature, but it is produced in an opposite sense. It does not lose sight of the imperfect and precarious character of traditional dogmas and symbols; it exaggerates it; but it loses sight of their specifically religious contents. Orthodoxy is mistaken as to the nature of the body of religion; rationalism as to the nature of its soul. Beneath the old traditional ideas it seeks for other ideas, moral or rational ideas, freer from sensible elements, and less contradictory, which it mistakes for the essence of religion. It replaces dogmas by other dogmas which it believes to be more simple, and which it regards as absolute truth. But in giving to religion a rational or doctrinal content, it empties it of its real content, of specific religious experience; it kills faith, which no longer having an object of its own, no longer has a _raison d'etre_. It has less liking than orthodoxy for symbolism and for religious creations; it is radically impossible for it to comprehend, and consequently to interpret, them. The chief vice and the misfortune of rationalism is to be anti-religious. The theory of _Critical Symbolism_, whose broad outlines we have traced, will bring us out of this old antithesis. It shows to us the kind of truth and the legitimacy possessed by symbolical ideas, without ignoring the psychological and historical determinism which rules their form and their appearance. It must not be imagined that, from this point of view, everything becomes fluid and inconstant in religion--that nothing in it can be fixed or permanent. In the progress of his life, man is destined to realise his spiritual nature, to attain to what St. Paul calls "the stature of Christ," in which the religious and moral ideal is realised. This moral stature is a reality, the highest of all realities. We tend towards it without ceasing, and the value of each moment of our inner life is measured by the progress that it marks towards that supreme end. For this inner life there is a norm which imposes itself on the consciousness with an imperative necessity, and, consequently, there may be religious symbols which are normal and normative in relation to others. These are the symbols which represent with perfect simplicity and fitness either this ideal end of the Christian life or some of the necessary moments through which the soul passes on the way to it. There are symbols, in a word, such as that of the Heavenly Father, the Kingdom of God, the New Birth, the Effusion of the Holy Spirit, so intimately bound up with our religious life, with its origin, its progress, or its end, which one cannot conceive as disappearing, so long as the spiritual life of humanity exists. All the exclusively religious words of Christ which bear directly on the consciousness are of this number. And it is of them that He was able to say without being contradicted by the ages: