By a procedure which Luther would never have dared to emulate Protestants have taken the liberty of employing on essential dogmas this power of symbolical interpretation which Luther reserved for texts of a secondary importance. The most essential of dogmas, that upon which all others depend, is the dogma of revelation. If, since Luther’s time, an orthodox Protestant feels himself at liberty to discuss at his ease whether the sense of the sacred Word is really this, that, or the other, he never for an instant questions whether the Word itself is really sacred in effect, or whether it really possesses any meaning that can properly be called divine. When he holds the Bible he has no doubt but that he has his hand upon the truth; he has only to discover it beneath the words in which it is contained, has only to dig for it in the sacred Book as a labourer might dig in a field in search of a buried treasure. But is it then quite certain that the treasure is really there, that the truth lies ready-made somewhere between the covers of the Book? That is the question which the liberal Protestant is asking himself, and he has already taken possession of Germany, of England, of the United States, and possesses even in France a large number of representatives. Previous to his advent all Christians were at one in the belief that the sacred Word really exists somewhere; at the present day this belief itself tends to become symbolic. No doubt there was in Jesus a certain element of divinity, but is there not in all of us, in one sense or another, a certain element of divinity? “Why should we be surprised,” writes a liberal clergyman, “at finding Jesus a mystery, when we are all of us ourselves a mystery?” According to the new Protestants there is no longer any reason for taking anything at its face value, not even what has hitherto been considered as the spirit of Christianity. For the most logical of them, the Bible is scarcely more than a book like another; custom has consecrated it; one may find God in it if one seeks Him there, because one may find God anywhere and put Him there, if by chance He be really not there already. The divine halo has dropped from Christ’s head, or rather he shares it with all the angels and all the saints. He has lost his celestial purity or rather we share it with him, all of us; for is not original sin also a symbol, and are we not all of us born innocent sons of God? The miracles are but fresh symbols which represent, grossly and visibly, the subjective power of faith. We are no longer to look for orders directly from God; God no longer talks to us by a single voice, but by all the voices of the universe, and it is in the midst of the great concert of nature that we must seize and distinguish the veritable Word. All is symbolic except God, who is the eternal truth. [Sidenote: And even to the conception of God.]