In face of the universe and its laws the individual ego is necessarily called on to submit and to renounce itself. The only matter of importance is to know upon what altar we shall make this sacrifice. Those who offer it on the altar of that blind divinity, "the nature of things," remain still unconsoled. Those who, with Jesus, make it in the arms of the Heavenly Father, accomplish it with strength and joy. From the awakening of consciousness to its highest point of development, man carries within him this radical contradiction: he feels that there is a mortal conflict between the idea that he gradually forms of the world and the idea he forms of himself. The ego wishes to conquer and does actually conquer the world; it even goes beyond it by thought; but the world has its revenge; it dominates the ego, it crushes it beneath the weight of its invincible laws, and it swallows it up,--itself, its efforts, its works, its thought,--like an ephemeral nonentity. Jesus felt this opposition; He suffered from this conflict. He resolved the antithesis by a third term, in which was realised the other two: the notion of the Father, whose beneficent will is equally sovereign in man and in the universe. And it is this happy solution of the enigma of life that still renders the religion of Jesus the religion of hope. Amongst men, in the midst of society, Jesus felt other relations and new obligations formed in His heart. His filial piety became a fraternal piety. The first commandment, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart," necessarily gave birth to the second: "And thy neighbour as thyself." The Father who lives in me lives equally in my neighbour; He loves him as much as He loves me. I ought therefore to love Him in my neighbour as well as in myself. This paternal presence of God in all human souls creates in them not only a link but a substantial and moral unity which makes them members of one body, whatever may be the external and contingent differences which separate them. From the Fatherhood in heaven flows the brotherhood on earth. From a relation of righteousness and love towards God springs a similar relation between men. In thus defining the religious connection of Jesus with His brethren I am afraid of weakening it. For Him it was not a matter of theory; for He never constructed any theory or formulated any doctrine of human fraternity; it was with Him a passionate sentiment, a deep-felt solidarity and kinship, a true family life, in which this Elder Brother's heart reverberated on the one hand with the love and pity of the Father, and, on the other, with the miseries and distresses of His brethren. In His parables Jesus does not say "The Father" simply; He habitually says "the father of the family," "the head of the house." It is because the father does not exist without his children, and because humanity, on earth at least, is the family, by means of which the paternity of God is realised.