There is in every faith some element of the naïveté which a child shows in its little semi-conscious hypocrisies, in its caresses which mask a demand and its smiles which are the efflorescence of satisfied desire. But without a certain element of genuineness, a certain element of real naïveté in the faith of the believers, no religion could exist, no revolution would be achieved, no important change would be produced in the life of humanity. Intellectual affirmation and action are always proportionate: to act is to believe and to believe is to act. [Sidenote: But illusions.] In our days, miracles are beginning to be scientifically explained. They are phenomena simply; frequently they were witnessed and described in good faith, but with insufficient knowledge. Everyone is acquainted, for example, with the biblical miracle according to which Isaiah “brought again the shadows of the degrees, which was gone down in the sun dial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward”; indeed the miracle has been reproduced. Mr. Guillemin[40] demonstrates by geometrical reasonings that, by inclining the dial slightly toward the horizon, the shadow may be made gradually to creep a certain distance backward. In the same way, the successive appearances of Jesus after his burial have been paralleled by a recent event in the United States: a criminal, at whose execution all his fellow-prisoners were present, appeared to all of them successively the next day, or the day after. The latter is a remarkable instance of collective hallucination, which shows that a group of individuals living in, so to speak, the same emotional habitat may well be struck at the same time by the same vision, without there being, on their part, either conscious or unconscious fraud or collusion. A third miracle, of an altogether different kind, has also been scientifically explained: I mean the colouring of the fleece of the flocks of Laban and of Jacob; the effect was obtained by a process well-known to the Egyptians, and mentioned by Pliny. Matthew Arnold believes that the miraculous cures also are not pure legend simply, that they bear witness to the great influence of mind over matter. Jesus really did exorcise devils, that is to say, the mad passions which howled about him. And thus may be understood in their true sense the words: “What does it matter whether I say, _Thy_ sins are forgiven thee! or whether I say Arise and walk?” and again: “Thou art made whole; sin no more, lest a worse thing befall thee.” Jesus himself must have known, as Socrates and Empedocles did, though even in a more extraordinary degree, that he possessed a moral and physical power, a virtue, which he himself did not understand and which seemed to him a divine gift. He knew himself to be morally and symbolically the healer of the deaf, the blind, the paralytic, a physician of souls; and the cures that he wrought in cases of hysteria, more or less temporary but