s and nations are involved in irremediable
ruin. Hence your antipathy to the church, to every institution
which is intended for the communication of religion, is always more
prominent than that which you feel to religion itself; hence, also,
priests, as the pillars and the most efficient members of such
institutions, are, of all men, the objects of your greatest
abomination.

Even those among you who hold a little more indulgent opinion with
regard to religion, and deem it rather a singularity than a disorder
of the mind, an insignificant rather than a dangerous phenomenon,
cherish quite as unfavorable impressions of all social organization
for its promotion. A slavish immolation of all that is free and
peculiar, a system of lifeless mechanism and barren ceremonies--these,
they imagine, are the inseparable consequences of every such
institution and are the ingenious and elaborate work of men, who, with
almost incredible success, have made a great merit of things which are
either nothing in themselves, or which any other person was quite as
capable of accomplishing as they. I should pour out my heart but very
imperfectly before you, on a subject to which I attach the utmost
importance, if I did not undertake to give you the correct point
of view with regard to it. I need not here repeat how many of the
perverted endeavors and melancholy fortunes of humanity you charge
upon religious associations; this is clear as light, in a thousand
utterances of your predominant individuals; nor will I stop to refute
these accusations, one by one, in order to fix the evil upon other
causes. Let us rather submit the whole conception of the church to
a new examination, and from its central point, throughout its whole
extent, erect it again upon a new basis, without regard to what it has
actually been hitherto, or to what experience may suggest concerning
it.

If religion exists at all, it must needs possess a social character;
this is founded not only in the nature of man, but still more in the
nature of religion. You will acknowledge that it indicates a state of
disease, a signal perversion of nature, when an individual wishes to
shut up within himself anything which he has produced and elaborated
by his own efforts. It is the disposition of man to reveal and to
communicate whatever is in him, in the indispensable relations
and mutual dependence not only of practical life, but also of his
spiritual being, by which he is connected wit