must accept it independently: he believes that the danger of private judgment is only apparent, and that in the intellectual world, as in the world of civil liberty, it is out of liberty that all authority worthy of respect takes its rise. The revolution which tends thus to replace a religious faith, founded on the authority of texts and symbols, by a moral faith founded upon the right of private judgment recalls the revolution accomplished three centuries ago by Descartes, who substituted evidence and reasoning for authority. Humanity is increasingly anxious to reason out its own beliefs, to see with its own eyes. The truth is no longer exclusively locked up in temples; it addresses itself to everybody, communicates with everybody, gives everybody the right to act. In the cult of scientific truth everyone, as in the early days of Christianity, is capable of officiating in his turn; there are no seats reserved in the sanctuary, there is no jealous God, or rather the temples of truth are those which each of us rears in his own heart—temples which are no more truly Christian than Hebrew or Buddhist. The absorption of religion into morality is one with the dissolution of all positive and determinate religion, of all traditional symbolism and of all dogmatism. Faith, said Heraclitus profoundly, is a sacred malady, ἱερὰ νόσος. For us moderns it is no longer a sacred malady, and it is one from which all of us wish to be delivered and cured. [61] Toward the end of his life Luther felt an increasing discouragement and disquietude on the subject of the reform inaugurated by him: “It is by severe laws and by superstition,” he wrote with bitterness, “that the world desires to be guided. If I could reconcile it with my conscience I would labour that the Pope with all his abominations might become once more our master.” Responsibility to one’s own conscience was indeed Luther’s fundamental idea—the idea which justifies the Reformation in the eyes of history, as formerly in the eyes of its own author. CHAPTER III. DISSOLUTION OF RELIGIOUS MORALITY. I. The first durable element of religious morality: Respect—Alteration of respect by the addition of the notion of the fear of God and divine vengeance. II. Second durable element of religious morality: Love—Alteration of this element by the addition of ideas of grace, predestination, damnation—Caducous elements of religious morality—Mysticism—Antagonism of divine love and human love—Asceticism—Excesses of asceticism—Especially in the religions of the East—Conception of sin in the modern mind. III. Subjective worship and prayer—The notion of prayer from the point of view of modern science and philosophy—Ecstasy—The survival of prayer.