But their conception of a divine ideal of righteousness still left God outside the consciousness. The image of His sanctity awakened in their souls the sense of sin and raised a tragic conflict between the human will enslaved by evil and the essentially inflexible law of God. God and man were found to be more profoundly separated by this moral antithesis of righteousness and sin than they had before been by the antithesis of strength and feebleness. How was this hostility to cease? A supreme revelation is about to respond to this cry of distress. God will become internal to the consciousness; He will manifest Himself, in man himself, as the principle of justification and salvation. He who was called _El, Allah_, the Mighty God, in patriarchal days,--He who from the times of Moses had been named _Jehovah_, the living God, the vigilant guardian of the Covenant,--will reveal Himself as the Father in the filial consciousness of Jesus Christ. The revelation of love comes to crown the revelation of force and righteousness. God desires to dwell in human souls. The Heavenly Father lives within the Son of Man, and the dogma of the God-Man, interpreted by the piety of each Christian, not by the subtle metaphysics of the doctors and the schools, becomes the central and distinguishing dogma of Christianity. Do not spoil its religious meaning, leave the mystery intact, see what is wrapped up in it: the sin of man effaced, the ancient conflicts ended, harmony restored, the whole moral and spiritual life enrooted in the eternal life of God, the Divine Life shed abroad in the heart of man. Try to comprehend this consummation of the religious unity of the Divine and the human sought for, cried for, in the dim desire of consciousness, and you will also comprehend that, at this point of view, as at all the others, the precedent religious evolution found its _raison d'etre_ and its final aim in the soul and in the work of Christ. The orphaned human soul and the distant unknown God are re-united and embraced in filial love, to be no more divided or estranged. 4. _The History of Prayer_ The living expression of the relations of man to his God, prayer is the very soul of religion. It brings to God the miseries of man, and brings back to man the communion and the help of God. Nothing better reveals the worth and moral dignity of a religion than the kind of prayer it puts into the lips of its adherents. Now, progress is more apparent here than anywhere else. The savage beats his fetish when it is not complacent enough. The Christian in his greatest distresses repeats the prayer of Jesus in the Garden: "Father, not my will, but Thine be done!" What a long road man has travelled between these two extreme points of religion!