But first let me explain what I understand by this word evolution, and let me eliminate from it the fatalistic sense too often given to it. If by evolution you mean a necessary and unconscious process, a mechanical and continuous movement, which, without either effort or danger, causes light to spring out of darkness, good from evil, and raises a people or a race from a lower to a higher form of life, you incur the reproach of confounding the laws of the moral world with those of the physical order; you will be condemned to falsify history in general and to understand nothing of the history of Israel in particular. In the moral and religious progress which constitutes the singular originality of that history, there is nothing facile, nothing that can be logically deduced from the natural predispositions of the nation. No doubt the prophets were the children of the nation and intimately connected with it; but the inspiration which breathes in them, raises them and animates them, is something entirely different from the ethnic genius of their race. The contrast is so great that it amounts to contradiction. The race, in Israel, as in Moab, or among the Edomites or Philistines, had its interpreters and prophets. But these were not the prophets of conscience. They flatter the people; they do not elevate them. They are found to be false prophets. The others, the witnesses for the righteous, holy God, only brought Hebraism to the consciousness of its religious vocation by a saecular and painful struggle against hereditary idolatry and immorality. This was not a collective evolution, but an essentially individualist reform; it was a moral creation continually interrupted and compromised; it was a work of faith and will. Each prophet enters into the conflict and utters his cry of battle and reform as if he were alone, responsible only to the God who has sent him, and yet all of them succeed each other and pursue the same design, because they are all obedient to the same identic inspiration. They fight against all; against the multitude that cannot break away from custom and from prejudice; against the priests who have always from the beginning made of the priesthood a _metier_ and of oracles a merchandise; against kings whose vanity, whose crimes, and whose exactions they denounce; against the great and rich oppressors of the weak and poor. They speak in the name of Jehovah, because Jehovah speaks in their consciousness. That is the origin of the prophetic spirit. It is a divine ferment which, perpetuating itself, becoming clearer, stronger, from generation to generation, gradually raises and transmutes the heavy mass of primitive Semitism. No, this is not the work of time and Nature, unless you see God at work in time, and, beneath this word Nature, by the side of realised and manifested forces you perceive the hidden and immeasurable virtualities which ferment in it and carry it beyond itself into the higher life of liberty and love.