function is to soften down the asperities of natural law, a Providence who distributes nothing but good and happiness, whereas nature distributes good and evil with equal indifference. It is Jesus we invoke, and it is to the personification of Providence rather than to that of the first cause of the world that humanity has kneeled these two thousand years. [Sidenote: Increasing opposition between notion of Providence and science.] A belief in miracles and in a Providence comes, in the course of its development, into sharper and sharper conflict with a belief in the order of nature. Man gives himself up to an exclusive preoccupation with what he supposes to be the means of ameliorating his destiny and that of his fellows: providential interference with the course of nature, sacrifice, and prayer are his great means of action on the world. He lives in the supernatural. There exists always, in the early stages of every religion, a certain sentiment of evil, of suffering, of terror; and to correct it the believer takes refuge in miracles. Providence is thus the primitive means of progress, and man’s first hope lay in the superhuman. [Sidenote: Practical evil of belief in Providence.] Fear of evil, and belief that it can be cured by divine intervention, were the origin of prayer. A positive religion, even in our days, can scarcely rest content with the conception of a God who simply sits at a distance and watches the march of a world which he regulated, once for all, at the beginning of time. He must absolutely show himself from time to time in our midst, we must feel the proximity of his hand ready to sustain us, he must be able to suspend the course of nature to our profit. Piety requires the stimulus of a belief in the immediate and present possibility of miracles, in their past existence, in their present existence even, and in one’s power of invoking them by prayer. Thus the believer opposes to the conception of ordinary determinism, as the regulating principle of the external world, a faith in a being capable at any moment of tampering with it; and he counts upon this power being exercised, he counts upon invoking it, he puts his hope in supernatural means not less than in natural means, and sometimes even to the neglect of the latter. * * * * * [Sidenote: Miracles not frauds.]