As Littré remarked, the mind may behave in three ways in regard to miracles: adore them, reject them as a mystification, or explain them by natural means. Primitive times, Antiquity, and the Middle Ages adored miracles; the eighteenth century rejected them as impostures and made game of them. It was then that the theory, that the founders of religion were impostors simply, was generally prevalent. One of the most necessary and most serious incidents in the human drama was simply mistaken for a bit of comedy. It was forgotten that men do not devote a whole lifetime to falsehood; the theory of imposture was a psychological as well as historical error. A man—even an actor or a politician—is always sincere on some side or other; at some period or other a man inevitably says what he thinks, even if only by mistake. Even certain palinodes, provoked by self-interest, are explicable by an unconscious deviation, under the influence of some passion, rather than by an altogether conscious and brazen determination to deceive; and even when one lies with all one’s heart, one inevitably believes, or soon comes to believe, some part of one’s own falsehood. The reproach of hypocrisy, of comedy and falsehood, has been uttered a hundred times in the course of history, and it has usually been a mistake. In the eighteenth century the same men who prepared and achieved the French Revolution were fond of accusing the prophets and Apostles, the revolutionists of an early date, of insincerity and fraud. To-day such an accusation can no longer be sustained against the sacred books, and the men of the eighteenth century are themselves accused of hypocrisy. For M. Taine, for example, almost all the leaders of the French Revolution lie under the reproach of insincerity, and the very people who sustained them were not, in his judgment, moved by the ideas which they proclaimed, but by the grossest self-interest. The fact is, there are always two points of view from which historic events may be regarded: that of personal interests, which come to the surface as seldom as possible, and that of the general and generous ideas which, on the contrary, are complacently given prominence in public speeches and writings. If it is useful for the historian to divine the interested motives which contributed to the production of a historical event, it is irrational to refuse to lend some measure of credence to the higher motives which justified it and which may well have lent their influence to that of self-interest. The human heart is not a one-stringed instrument. The revolutionists had faith in the Revolution, in the rights which they were vindicating, in equality and fraternity; they even believed, sometimes, in their own disinterestedness, as the Protestants believed in the Reformation, as Christ and the prophets believed in their own inspiration; as even in our days, by a belated superstition, the Pope believes in his own infallibility.