I must add that this notion of miracle is absolutely the same in Biblical as in profane literature. In a general way, no doubt, the supernatural in the history of Israel and in the early days of Christianity is of a more sober, more profoundly moral and religious character than it is everywhere else. But the sacred writers do not represent miracles differently. Without exception, they also conceive of them as a violation, by a particular volition of God, of the ordinary course of things.... Still, so far from being more striking or more numerous, miracles and prodigies in the Bible are rarer than elsewhere, clearer, less fantastic, more under law to conscience and to common sense. The worship of one God, invisible, spiritual, in whom centres the ideal of wisdom, reason, righteousness, conceived by the prophets, joined to the lack of imagination in the Hebrew race, has freed the Bible from the luxuriant growths of oriental mythologies and theogonies, as of the marvellous in the poesy of Greece. Nothing purifies the mind like a great moral idea around which all the rest organises itself. It is very remarkable that the great prophets, Isaiah, Amos, Micah, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, work hardly any miracles. If prodigy has penetrated into the life of Jesus at two or three points, the explanation is to be found in the mistakes or the legendary corruptions for which His biographers are alone responsible, and which criticism may eliminate without violence. Prodigy, properly so called, is quite foreign to the wholly moral conduct of His life, and to the strictly religious conception of His work. He did not found His religion on miracle, but on the light, the consolation, the pardon and the joy which His gospel, issuing from His holy, loving heart, brought to broken and repentant souls. His works proceeded only from His charity. Far from wishing to impose belief in His miracles, He often forbids men to divulge them. It is to the faith of the afflicted that He refers their cure. He turns away from the seductive invitations of miraculous _Messianism_ as from the distrust or the curiosity of an incredulous wisdom. To those who demanded of Him an indubitable prodigy come from heaven, He answers that no sign shall be given them save the preaching of repentance by the prophet Jonah. The whole temptation in the wilderness is simply a victory of the moral consciousness over the religion of physical prodigy. His filial piety to the Father raised Him above miracle itself and above the dualism that miracle supposes in Nature and in the divine action. He discovers in everything the signs of the presence, the will, the affection, of His Father. He accepts them, submits to them, celebrates them, without preoccupying Himself with the ordinary or the extraordinary manner in which they may be manifested. This absolute piety, absolutely pure and confident, succeeds in realising the unity of the world and the