Is everything explained in religion, then, and nothing left obscure? Far from that! There remains the ground from which emerges the conscious and moral life of the soul; there remains that initial mystery, the relation in our consciousness between the individual and the universal element, between the finite and the infinite, between God and man. How can we comprehend their co-existence and their union, and yet how can we doubt it? Where is the thoughtful man to-day who has not broken the thin crust of his daily life, and caught a glimpse of those profound and obscure waters on which floats our consciousness? Who has not felt within himself a veiled presence and a force much greater than his own? What worker in a lofty cause has not perceived within his own personal activity, and saluted with a feeling of veneration, the mysterious activity of a universal and eternal power? _In Deo vivimus, movemur et sumus_. There is perhaps no other mystery in religion; at all events all others are but particular forms of this. But this mystery cannot be dissipated, for, without it, religion itself would no longer exist. CHAPTER III MIRACLE AND INSPIRATION In speaking of revelation we have already touched on the doctrines of inspiration and of miracle, which are dependencies of it, and, as it were, constituent parts. But these two notions are still so obscure in the public mind, and give rise to so many and such lively controversies, that it may be well to return to them and study them by themselves and in some detail. In this matter there are two causes of dispute and misunderstanding. The first is that everybody believes he ought to begin by giving his own personal and arbitrary definition of miracle, and afterwards explain by way of deduction why he believes or does not believe in it. The debate thus turns on a question of terminology--that is to say, on a vain and barren logomachy. The second cause is that the defenders of miracle always keep to abstractions, instead of following their contradictors on to the ground of criticism of miraculous stories and placing themselves in presence of the facts which alone make up the matter of the discussion. They believe they have gained everything when they have proved that God, according to the very definition of the idea that we have of Him, can do everything--which no one denies--while the problem consists not in knowing what God can do _in abstracto_, but what He has done _in concreto_, in Nature and in History. Now, in order to know what is really done, and whether there are or ever have been produced phenomena which must be referred to the immediate intervention, and to a particular volition of God, independently of the concurrence of second causes, this is evidently something that only the critical observation of facts, past or present, can teach us. Every other method of research and discussion is illusory.