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312 moral side of Christianity. And when fraternity was first put upon the order of the day in 1848, this fact was to some extent recognized. Christianity actually played a certain part in that Revolution. But then followed a restoration of the old alliance between the Church and Government. For twenty years they continued accomplices in reaction. The consequence has been that when Revolution once more raises its head, it is no longer able to see the identity of fraternity and Christianity, nay, absolutely identifies Christianity with the negation of fraternity. How far it is possible to falsify an institution was never known to mankind until, in 1871, the Paris workmen assailed with irreconcilable fury the Church of Christ in the name of human brotherhood.

Thus the political repugnance of the Revolution to theology is in part merely a repugnance to an institution which has falsified the theology of which it is the depositary, and in any case is a repugnance not to theology as such, but merely to a particular theology. But the Revolution has also, no doubt, a quarrel with theology as a doctrine. "Theology," it says, "even if not exactly opposed to social improvement, is a superstition, and as such allied to ignorance and conservatism. Granting that its precepts are good, it enforces them by legends and fictitious stories which can only influence the uneducated; and, therefore, in order to preserve its influence, it must needs oppose education. Nor are these stories a mere excrescence of theology, but theology itself. For theology is neither more nor less than a doctrine of the supernatural. It proclaims a power behind Nature which occasionally interferes with natural laws. It proclaims another world quite different from this in which we live, a world into which what is called the soul is believed to pass at death. It believes, in short, in a number of things which students of Nature know nothing about, and which science puts aside either with respect or with contempt." Now, these supernatural doctrines are not merely a part of theology, still less separable from theology, but theology consists exclusively of them. Take away the supernatural person, miracles, and the spiritual world, you take away theology at the same time, and nothing is left but simple Nature and simple science. Thus theology comes to be used in the sense of supernaturalism, and in this view also excites the hostility of the age. Not merely scientific men themselves, for of these I am not now speaking, but liberals in general, all those who have any tincture of science, all whose minds have in any degree taken the scientific stamp, a vast number already, and, as education spreads, likely to become coextensive with civilized mankind, form a habit of thought with which they are led to consider theology irreconcilable.

It is a singular coincidence which has combined in apparent opposition to theology the two mightiest forces of the present age. Truly it is not against flesh and blood that Religion has to contend,