criticism and give satisfaction to piety. 4. _Psychological Notion_ To return to psychology. In all piety there is some positive manifestation of God. Otherwise, one might question the value of religious phenomena. Three consequences follow: the revelation of God will be evident, interior, progressive. It will be interior, because God, not having phenomenal existence, can only reveal Himself to spirit, and in the piety that He Himself inspires. If revealers and prophets believed they heard the voice of God outside themselves they were the victims of a psychological illusion that analysis discerns and dissipates. The old theologian was right who said: _Nulla fides si non primum Deus ipse loquitur; Nulla que verba Dei nisi quae in penetralibus audit Ipsa fides._[1] This interior revelation is only made, it is true, in connection with some external event of Nature or of History. If wonder is the beginning of philosophy it is also the commencement of piety. Religious emotion does not spring up by chance and unconditionally. But external signs are only revealers for those who know how to comprehend them, and who are able to interpret them in a religious sense. That is why the distinction sometimes made between the _manifestation_ of God in things and divine _inspiration_ in consciousness, between the sign or external miracle and the inward word, is of little worth except for pedagogic purposes. The manifestation of God in Nature or in History is always a matter of faith. It would only appear to be such in the light on the hearth of consciousness. Put out that inner light and everything speedily becomes obscure: "If the light that is in thee be darkness, there will be darkness round about thee," says Jesus. To the deaf man the universe is mute. The starry heavens which bent the pensive brows of Newton and of Kant before the majesty of God, said nothing to Laplace. Lit up within, the soul of Christ saw everywhere the signs of God. Caiaphas saw none. In the cross of Jesus, where St. Paul discerned the manifestation of the wisdom and the power of God, the Pharisees had only seen the crushing proof that this Messiah was a mere impostor. [1] There is no faith save in the heart where God has first made Himself heard, and there are no divine words except those which faith hears in the inmost sanctuary of the soul.