Such was the prayer of Jesus. It did not consist in an outward flow of words, but in a constant, silent state of soul which made Him say in turning towards His Father: "I know that Thou hearest me always." Confidence increases with renunciation. Admirable progress of religion! Sublime reversal of roles! At the beginning the ambition of the pious man was to bend the Divine will to his own; at the end his peace, his happiness, is to subordinate his wishes and desires to the will of a Father who knows how to be gracious, righteous, perfect! There is another aspect of this progress. In all religions there is a double gamut of feeling: the one, which rules in primitive religions, and whose dominant note is fear and sadness; the other, which prevails in the end, in which the dominant note is confidence and joy. It is a natural effect of the progressive victory of the religious consciousness gradually surmounting the contradictions in the midst of which it is born and developed. At the outset, man, alone and defenceless, finds no fewer enemies in heaven than on earth. He feels as if surrounded by hostile and mysterious powers before which he cringes in fear, awaiting their decisions with respect to him. But everything changes when there rises within his soul the luminous dawn of the moral revelation of God. With the darkness, vanish all the frightful phantoms of the night. In the God whom he adores he sees his own interior law glorified and become henceforth the supreme law of things. That law of righteousness is, at bottom, a law of love. Nothing can trouble me any more except the sense of my own failure--that is, of my own sin, which alone can separate me from the very principle of righteousness and life. But, see, justice manifests itself as justifying grace! God gives it as He gives life to those who thirst for it. Reconciliation is complete. The orphan has found his Father; the Father, His child. The sinner, trembling, begins his prayer, prostrated; he ends it upright, with the confidence and freedom of a child that feels itself at home within the Father's house. The Gospel bids us to rejoice; it makes of joy an obligation, while distrust and sadness are the marks of selfishness and unbelief. 5. _Conclusion_