The rose, which from all times has been the type of beauty, life, love and pleasure, expressed mystically the secret thought of all protests manifested at the Renaissance.[263] It was the flesh in rebellion against the oppression of spirit; it was Nature testifying that, like grace, she was a daughter of God; it was love refusing to be stifled by the celibate; it was life in revolt against sterility; it was humanity aspiring towards natural religion, full of reason and love, founded on the revelations of the harmony of being, of which the rose, for initiates, was the living floral symbol. It is in truth a pantacle; the form is circular, the leaves of the corolla are heart-shaped and rest harmoniously on one another; its tint offers the most harmonious shades of the primitive colours; its calyx is of purple and gold. We have seen that Flamel, or rather the _Book of Abraham the Jew_, represents it as the hieroglyphical sign of the fulfilment of the Great Work.[264] Here is the key to the romance of Clopinel and William de Lorris. The conquest of the rose was the problem offered by initiation to science, whilst religion was at work to prepare and to establish the universal, exclusive and final triumph of the Cross. The problem proposed by high initiation was the union of the Rose and the Cross, and in effect occult philosophy, being the universal synthesis, must take into account all phenomena of being. Considered solely as a physiological fact, religion is the revelation and satisfaction of a need of souls. Its existence as a fact is scientific, and to deny it would be a denial of humanity itself. No one has invented it; like laws and civilisations, it is formed by the necessities of moral life. From this merely philosophical and restrained standpoint, religion must be regarded as fatal if one explains all by fatality, and as Divine if one confesses to a Supreme Intelligence as the mainspring of natural laws.[265] Hence it follows that the characteristic of every religion, properly so called, being to depend directly from Divinity by a supernatural revelation—no other mode of transmission providing a sufficient sanction of dogma—it must be concluded that the true natural religion is religion that has been revealed; this is to say, it is natural to adopt a religion only on the understanding that it has been revealed, every true religion exhorting sacrifices, and man having neither the power nor right to impose the same on his fellow-creatures, outside and especially above the ordinary conditions of humanity.