Sinai is still in existence; that is the sort of argument that is successful with the people. Livingstone says that the negroes listened and believed from the moment he showed them the Bible and told them that the celestial Father had written His will on the pages of that book; they touched the pages and believed at once. [Sidenote: Inference from reality of the sign to reality of the thing signified the essence of faith in revelation.] In effect, blind confidence in a word, in a sign—precipitate induction from which one infers from the reality of the sign to the reality of the thing signified: a second induction to the effect that any doctrine relatively elevated, from the social and moral point of view, and put forth by men one respects, is probably true, even if it be in many points irrational—these are the principal elements of the primitive faith in revelation. And this faith, in all its crudity, exists at the present day. It wins its way through the eyes and ears; therein lies its power. It is much less mystical than we are inclined to fancy; it is incarnate in its monuments, its temples, its books; it walks about and breathes in the person of its priests, its saints, its gods; we cannot look about us without realizing its existence in one form or another. It has been of great service to human thought, in spite of its pitfalls, thus to have been able to express itself, to fashion objects in its own image, to penetrate marble and stone, to provide that it shall itself be borne back in upon us from without. How can one doubt what is visible and tangible? [Sidenote: Results in “credo quia ineptum.”]