172 Science Religion and Reality 



as there is compulsion — that is to say, something which is not 

 freely willed by us — the process of action cannot therefore be 

 considered complete. 



In order to be all that we wished to be, we must take a last 

 step — ^accept the Christian revelation. One cannot, in fact, 

 object to this that it presents itself as a complexity of truths superior 

 to reason, because reason has shown itself insufficient to satisfy our 

 Ego, What we still desire must lie beyond that. 



Man must, then, accept as a provisional hypothesis the dogmas 

 which the Christian religion sets before him, and act in conformity 

 with them, in order to test whether he finds in them that satisfac- 

 tion of his profound desires which he had sought in vain in the 

 sphere of phenomena. Faith does not pass from the thought to 

 the heart, says Blondel, but draws a divine light from experience 

 through the mind. In that lies the importance of ritual acts, 

 which are not symbols, but the vehicle and the very body of the 

 transcendental. In them man finds God, who thus comes to be 

 realised through the very conscience. In religious experience he 

 is indeed identified with God, and fuses his will with the Divine 

 Will. The voluntas valuta, being made conscious, is thus entirely 

 equalised with the voluntas volens, which was really God himself, 

 the agent of the unknown profundity of our spirit. 



Le Roy, drawing his inspiration from the doctrines of Bergson 

 and Blondel, has given an interpretation of religious dogmas which 

 has since been accepted by the Modernists. A dogma is not a 

 knowledge of an objective truth, but is above all a rule of conduct 

 and enunciates a prescription of a practical character. For 

 example, to assert that God is personal would only mean, " Act 

 in your relations with him as you would with a human person " ; 

 while the resurrection of Christ would mean that one must act with 

 regard to Him as one would have done before His death, or as one 

 Would do towards a contemporary. The Christian, by accepting 

 dogmas in this sense, is left perfectly free to make for himself what- 

 ever theory or representation he wishes of corresponding objects, 

 such as the personality of God, the Resurrection of Christ, or His 

 Real Presence in the Sacrament. A single condition is imposed 

 upon him, that his theory will have to justify the practical rules 

 enunciated by the dogma, and that its intellectual representation 

 will have to take those prescriptions into account. From that 

 springs the possibility of the evolution of dogmas. Their formulae 



