15
I said in the first part of this essay that too lofty a revelation, even were it incontestable, would have hardly any influence upon our life, that it would change little in it, that it would occur too far from us in the immensity of space and that it would not sink into our hearts and minds. Was it thus with that of which we are now speaking, which is the only truly superhuman and yet acceptable and almost unassailable revelation that we have had? Yes and no, according to the point of view which we take up. All that it contains of too great a character, except its notion of eternity, has not really modified our ideas, has not permeated into our habits. It has not even profoundly affected the peoples who have handed it down to us and who, abandoning any endeavour to understand it, have transformed it into a barbarous and monstrous anthropomorphic polytheism. It is more or less the same everywhere. All the religions, from the pagan religions of China and Japan, Gaul and ancient Germany, Mexico and Peru, down to Christianity with its variants and its offshoots, have issued from it; but all have not been able to live and govern men, save by disfiguring and mutilating it, by dwarfing it to the lowest stature of the souls of their time, by altering it beyond recognition. It is therefore highly probable that matters would be the same with any other and greater revelation, if such were possible, even though this had all the signs of a divine, direct, authentic, indubitable, irrefutable, irrecusable revelation, in a word, with that which we are still awaiting without daring to hope for it.
THE NECESSARY SILENCE