The scholastic notion is not only irreligious; it is anti-psychological. In entering the human understanding this supernatural knowledge introduces into it a hopeless dualism. The sacred sciences are set up alongside the profane sciences without its being possible to organise them together into a coherent and harmonious body, for they are not of the same nature, they do not proceed from the same method, they do not accept the same control. You have thus a sacred cosmogony and a profane cosmogony, a sacred history of the origins of man and a purely human history of his beginnings, and of his first adventures, a divine metaphysic and another purely rational. How to make them live together and unite them? If, by a subtle theology, you succeed in rationalising dogma, do you not see that you destroy it in its very essence? If you demonstrate that it is essentially irrational, do you not feel that you are instituting an endless warfare between the authority of dogma and the authority of reason? One remembers the generous attempt of mediaeval scholasticism, taken up again by the Protestant theologians of the seventeenth century, and one has not forgotten its twice fatal issue. One would need to have no notion of the laws of human thought to be astonished at it. Nominalism in the fifteenth century and rationalism in the eighteenth were the two natural heirs of orthodoxy. The intervention of miracle as a _criterion_ or proof of doctrine does not remove the difficulties of the theory; it multiplies and aggravates them. In consequence of the lapse of time, the incertitude of the documents, and the demands of modern thought, miracle, which formerly established the truth of religion, has become much more difficult to demonstrate than religion itself. The relation between the two has been reversed. The foundation of the edifice has become more ruinous than the building. Examples? Consider, then, on the one hand, the Decalogue, and on the other the thunders and lightnings of Sinai. Peals of thunder may have served to convince the Hebrews that the law of Moses came from the Eternal; for they looked upon thunder as revealing the presence, in some sort material and local, of their God. But who does not see that it is much easier to-day to prove the excellence and the truth of the _Ten Words_ of the Law than the divine character of the most terrible of tempests? Make the opposite experiment: you are familiar with the Books of Joshua, Judges, Kings. You have read in them those orders issued by Jehovah for the total extermination of peoples whose crime was the defence of their country against the invaders. Prodigies abound in them: the walls of Jericho fall down at the sound of trumpets, etc., etc. Are these events sufficient to warrant us in admitting the affirmation of the Hebrew historian that these terrible reprisals, these crimes and violences, which were then common in all the Semitic tribes, were commanded either