This concrete definition of religion has the advantage of correcting by completing that of Schleiermacher. It reconciles the two antithetic elements which constitute the religious sentiment: the passive and the active elements, the feeling of dependence and the movement of liberty. Prayer, springing up out of our state of misery and oppression, delivers us from it. There is in it both submission and faith. Submission makes us recognise and accept our dependence, faith transforms that dependence into liberty. These two elements correspond to the two poles of the religious life; for in all true piety man prostrates himself before the omnipotence that encompasses him, and he rises with a feeling of deliverance and of concord with his God. Schleiermacher erred in insisting only upon resignation. Thenceforth he could neither escape Pantheism in order to arrive at liberty, nor find any link between the religious and the moral life. Religion, then, is a free act as well as a feeling of dependence. And such is the character and the virtue of the act of prayer that everything is transformed by it. The crushing feeling of my defeat becomes the joyful and triumphant feeling of my victory. Each of these states is changed into its opposite, so that the truly religious man lives at once in a free obedience and in an obedient liberty. If religion has often been an oppressive power and an instrument of servitude, it has been at least as often the mother of all the liberties. The force which bows me down is that which also lifts me up, for it passes into my soul. The God that I adore comes in the end to be an inward God whose presence drives away all fear and places me beyond the reach of all the menaces of things. The conscious realisation of this presence of God,--that is the true salvation of my being and my life.