universal and continuous action of God, quite as well as the dialectic of a Scotus Eriginus or a Spinoza or a Hegel; for it suppresses still more radically the old and mortal antithesis of the natural and the supernatural. Nature in its expansion and its evolution--what is it but the very expression of the Will of the Father? How can you imagine then that there could ever be conflict in it between the order which reigns in it and the action of Him by whom that order is maintained day by day and moment by moment? If the thought of Jesus was bounded by the ancient notion of miracle, it must be acknowledged that His piety was not imprisoned in it, but went beyond it. Not having come into the world to teach science, He contented Himself with the opinions He had inherited with the rest of His people, and which constituted the science of Nature of His little popular environment, without concerning Himself as to whether these opinions were erroneous or correct. Miracle was not then something essentially religious as it is to-day. Belief in miracles was not a sign of piety. Everybody shared in it, men of the world as well as men of God. Herod believed in them not less than the apostles. The Pharisees did not doubt them; they only denied the miracles of Jesus; they attributed them to Beelzebub. Christ did not doubt any more than they did that Satan and the demons wrought as many and perhaps more miracles than the messengers of God. He did not wish them to believe the doctrine because of the prodigy, but in the prodigy because of the doctrine. It will be seen how far they were at that time from the dualism of our day, and from the conflict created by scholasticism between science and piety. When we examine this ancient notion of miracle, especially in the superior expression it receives in the Bible, we discover in it two things: it is made up of two judgments of a very different order: of an intellectual and scientific order, disclosing that which then existed in point of fact, a _naif_ and perfect ignorance of the nature and the laws of things; and of a judgment of a religious order, implying an absolute confidence in an all-good God who is almighty to respond to the cry of His children and to deliver them. These two judgments are so thoroughly blended in the biblical notion of miracle that orthodox theologians and irreligious philosophers agree in declaring them to be inseparable, and they would compel us to choose between a piety hostile to the elementary results of science, and a science radically hostile to piety. The dilemma is specious but false. To see it vanish it is only necessary to perceive that these two judgments, not being of the same nature, cannot be eternally _solidaire_. The settlement of the controversy in which Christian thought has been engaged for the last three centuries will consist in separating them. * * * * * 2. _The Notion of Miracle in the Face of Modern Science and of Piety_