As for the purely passive reception of tradition, this may be conceived
when only unimportant legends are in question, or doctrines which occupy
the mind only as matters of curiosity; but when life is at stake, and
the interests of our whole existence, the mind labors upon the ideas
which it receives. Religion is only living in any soul when all the
faculties have come into exercise; and faith, by its own proper nature,
seeks to understand. The distinction between traditional data therefore
and pure philosophy is far from being so real or so extensive as it is
commonly thought to be. But for lack of time, I might undertake to prove
to you more at length that the labor of individual thought upon the
common tradition is the absolute and permanent law of development for
the human mind.

We have to steer between two extreme and contrary pretensions. What
shall we say to those theologians who deny all power to man's reason,
and consider the understanding as a receiver which does nothing but
receive the liquid which is poured into it? to those theologians who,
not content with despising Aristotle and Plato, think themselves obliged
to vilify Socrates and calumniate Regulus? We will tell them that they
depart from the grand Christian tradition, of which they believe
themselves _par excellence_ the representatives. We will add that they
outrage their Master by seeming to believe that in order to exalt Him it
is necessary to calumniate humanity. Again, what shall we say to those
philosophers, who do not wish for truth except when they have succeeded
in educing it by themselves? to those philosophers who draw a little
circle about their own personal thought, and say: If truth discovers
itself outside this circle we have no wish to see it; and who boast that
they only are free, because they have abandoned the common beliefs? We
will tell them that they are deceiving themselves by taking for their