One step more. Let us follow this historical incarnation of religious tradition into its most material form. The inner experiences of men of God and the witness of them that they give to the world, express themselves naturally in speech, and this in its turn is transformed into Scripture. It is in this way that in all civilised religions divine revelation is presented to man in the form of a sacred writing; everywhere it is gathered into collections of sacred books which have been called the bibles of humanity. While all these have been born according to the same psychological and historical laws, it does not follow that they have all the same value, or that an unintelligent syncretism has the right to mix together the various elements in them to make of them one common and characterless Bible. No; each of them naturally belongs to a particular stage in the ladder of divine revelations, and there we must leave them. The highest will always be that which contains the deepest and purest expression of inward religion, and consequently offers to man the most precious treasure. The rank of the Hebrew and Christian Bible is thus found to be logically determined by the moral worth of the Hebrew and the Christian religions. But in leaving historical criticism and religious experience to make here the necessary demonstration and render it daily more evident, we must once more call to mind the always human conditions of these written collections, of those at the top as well as those at the bottom of the ladder, conditions which forbid us ever to identify the letter and the spirit, the divine inspiration and the particular form in which it has been clothed. God, wishing to speak to us, has never chosen any but human organs. With whatever inspiration He has endowed them, that inspiration has always therefore passed through human subjectivity; it has only been able either to express or to translate itself in the language and the turn of mind of a particular individual and of a particular time. Now, no individual and historical form can be absolute. If the contents are divine, the vessel is always earthen. The organ of the revelation of God necessarily limits it. It must of necessity accommodate itself to the limits of human receptivity. How could it possibly enter and mingle with the changing waves of the intellectual and moral life of humanity unless it flowed in the bed of the river and between its banks?