Reduced to its religious and moral significance, miracle, for Jesus, was the answer to prayer, as M. Ménégoz (_pp. cit._ pp. 19-29) has clearly shown, and this altogether apart from the phenomenal mode in which the answer was produced. God only manifests Himself in extraordinary events in order that we may learn to recognise Him in ordinary ones. The child asks, the father grants; but the child does not trouble himself about the means by which his wishes are gratified. The pious man adores the ways he cannot comprehend. This confidence in the love and justice of God may be accompanied in the mind of the apostles and of Jesus Himself by imperfect or erroneous scientific ideas as to the mode of divine action in Nature. But it is not _solidaire_, with them, and may easily be detached in order to bring it into harmony with the views of our present science, as in the mind of Jesus and the apostles it was in harmony with the science of their time. For piety, the laws of Nature which have since then been revealed to us in their sovereign constancy, become the immediate expression of the will of God. The Christian submits to them instinctively, saying: "Thy will be done." Which is only saying that these laws, which are sometimes spoken of with a sort of horror, as of a blind and brutal fate, become religious and are consecrated in the eyes of piety by a divine authority. Why then should not piety offer to science and its revelations of Nature the same frank and joyous welcome as that accorded to them by scientists themselves? The opposition established by scholasticism between faith and science, is it not as irreligious as it is irrational, and has it not been one of the chief causes of the death of theology in the Church and of the triumph of incredulity in the present age?
While developing themselves on parallel lines, can science and faith remain isolated? Man is one, and his scientific activity, like his religious activity, tends to a synthesis. The synthesis will be found in a teleological consideration of the universe. This universal teleology, faith predicts it, science labours to realise it. It can only be established by this twofold concurrence. Without faith, knowledge of the universe is impossible; without phenomenal science all interpretation of the universe becomes illusory. Faith, therefore, must become more and more an act of confidence in God, and the scientific study of phenomena ever more profound and rigorous. Of course the teleological synthesis will never be completed here below, but it will always find a provisional and satisfying conclusion in the act of confidence and adoration towards God.