unish him who
should offend Him--provided there be still controversies on the
existence of God.

Thus all the cornerstones of the present "order" become myths. Parents
will tell their children stories on those heads, like legends from olden
days. The narrations of the persecutions, that men with new ideas are
to-day overwhelmed with, will sound to them just as the stories of the
burning of heretics and witches sound to us to-day. The names of all the
great men, who to-day distinguish themselves by their persecutions of
the new ideas, and who are applauded by their narrow-minded
contemporaries, are forgotten and blown over, and they are run across
only by the historian who may happen to dive into the past. What remarks
may escape him, we care not to tell, seeing that, unhappily, we do not
yet live in an age where man is free to breathe.

As with the State, so with "Religion."[208] It is not "abolished." God
will not be "dethroned"; religion will not be "torn out of the hearts of
people"; nor will any of the silly charges against the Socialists
materialize. Such mistaken policies the Socialists leave to the
Bourgeois ideologists, who resorted to such means in the French
Revolution and, of course, suffered miserable shipwreck. Without any
violence whatever, and without any manner of oppression of thought,
religion will gradually vanish.

Religion is the transcendental reflection of the social conditions of
given epochs. In the measure that human development advances and society
is transformed, religion is transformed along with it. It is, as Marx
puts it, a popular striving after the illusory happiness that
corresponds with a social condition which needs such an illusion.[209]
The illusion wanes so soon as real happiness is descried, and the
possibility of its realization penetrates the masses. The ruling classes
endeavor, in their own interest, to prevent this popular conception.
Hence they seek to turn religion into a means to preserve their
domination. The purpose appears fully in their maxim: "The people must
be held to religion." This particular business becomes an official
function in a society that rests upon class rule. A caste is formed that
assumes this function and that turns the whole acumen of their minds
towards preserving, and enlarging such a social structure, seeing that
thereby their own power and importance are increased.

Starting in fetishism at low stages of civilization and primitive social
cond