[Sidenote: Preservation of the letter while tampering with the spirit of the Bible.] In our days very estimable persons have essayed to push Christianity also into a new path. In according the right of interpretation to private individuals, Luther gave them the right of clothing their own individual thoughts in the language of the antique dogmas and the texts of the sacred books. Insomuch that by a singular revolution, the “Word,” which was considered in the beginning as the faithful expression of the divine thought, has tended to become for each of us the expression of our own personal thought. The sense of the words depending really upon ourselves, the most barbarous language can be made at a pinch to serve us for the conveyance of the noblest ideas. By this ingenious expedient texts become flexible, dogmas become acclimated more or less to the intellectual atmosphere in which they are placed, and the barbarism of the sacred books becomes disguised. By virtue of living with the people of God we civilize them, we lend them our ideas, inoculate them with our aspirations, everyone interprets the Bible to suit himself, and the result is that the commentary ultimately overgrows and half obscures the text itself; we no longer read with undimmed vision—we look through a medium which disguises everything that is hideous, and lends a fresh beauty to everything that is beautiful. At bottom the veritable sacred Word is no longer the one which God pronounced and sent forth reverberating, eternally the same, down the centuries; it is the one which we pronounce or rather whisper—for is it not the sense which one puts upon it that constitutes the real value of an utterance? and it is we who determine the sense. The Divine Spirit has passed into the believer and, at certain times at least, the true God would seem to be one’s own thought. This attempt at a reconciliation between religion and free-thought is a masterpiece of tact. Religion seems always to lag a little behind, but free-thought by exercise of a little ingenuity always find means, in the end, of helping it forward. The progress of the two consists of a series of arrangements, compromises, something like what takes place between a conservative Senate and a progressive Chamber of Deputies, honestly in search of a _modus vivendi_. [Sidenote: Extension of symbolic interpretation to essential dogmas.]