t now be imposed;
that the Bible has no more authority than the books of Plato or
Aristotle; that each man has a revelation in himself, free from the
imperfections of the Mosaic and Christian revelations; that science,
criticism, and examination open the only path to truth; that miracles
should be discarded; that Protestantism has lost sight of its mission;
and that a second Reformation, embodied in the Church of the Future, is
needed to complete the first.[103]

An acknowledged leader of the liberal party has made some statements
which more nearly approach the enunciation of a system than we have been
able to find in any other authority of French Rationalism.

M. Reville says, "The modern Protestant theology [Rationalism] aspires
not to deny the doctrines of the Reformation absolutely, but to preserve
the truth that is in them by filtering them through a medium more
conformed to our science and our reason. The dogmas of original sin, the
trinity, the incarnation, justification by faith, future rewards, and
the inspiration of the sacred writings, may serve as examples. On the
first of these dogmas, renouncing the idea of an original perfection,
the reality of which is contrary to reason, and to all our historical
analogies, modern theology would insist on the evil influence which
determines to evil an individual plunged in society where sin reigns,
on the necessary passage from a state of innocence to a state of moral
consciousness and struggle, on the fall which man endures when he sinks
from his higher nature to his lower, and renounces God's will to serve
his own. As to the trinity, avoiding the scholastic and contradictory
tritheism of the old creeds, intent on vigorously preserving God's
essential unity, and at the same time his conscious or personal life,
this theology attaches itself to the grand idea of the Divine Word
pervading the world, as the uttered thought, the objective revelation of
God, conceived as manifesting himself to himself in his works. In
humanity this eternal word becomes the Holy Spirit, the light which
lightens every man coming into the world, but which shines in all its
splendor in Jesus Christ. In this series of ideas the incarnation loses
that stamp of absolute contradiction which it takes from the orthodox
idea of one and the same person, who is at the same time God and man,
finite and infinite, localized and omnipresent, praying and prayed to,
knowing and not knowing all things, and imp