ved, as Jesus lived,
amidst a social system absolutely different from that of nowadays. The
age was different, the very world was different. And if it were merely a
question of retaining only such of the moral teaching of Jesus as seemed
human and eternal, was there not again a danger in applying immutable
principles to the society of every age? No society could live under the
strict law of the Gospel. Was not all order, all labour, all life
destroyed by the teaching of Jesus? Did He not deny woman, the earth,
eternal nature and the eternal fruitfulness of things and beings?
Moreover, Catholicism had reared upon His primitive teaching such a
frightful edifice of terror and oppression. The theory of original sin,
that terrible heredity reviving with each creature born into the world,
made no allowance as Science does for the corrective influences of
education, circumstances and environment. There could be no more
pessimist conception of man than this one which devotes him to the Devil
from the instant of his birth, and pictures him as struggling against
himself until the instant of his death. An impossible and absurd
struggle, for it is a question of changing man in his entirety, killing
the flesh, killing reason, destroying some guilty energy in each and
every passion, and of pursuing the Devil to the very depths of the
waters, mountains and forests, there to annihilate him with the very sap
of the world. If this theory is accepted the world is but sin, a mere
Hell of temptation and suffering, through which one must pass in order to
merit Heaven. Ah! what an admirable instrument for absolute despotism is
that religion of death, which the principle of charity alone has enabled
men to tolerate, but which the need of justice will perforce sweep away.
The poor man, who is the wretched dupe of it all, no longer believes in
Paradise, but requires that each and all should be rewarded according to
their deserts upon this earth; and thus eternal life becomes the good
goddess, and desire and labour the very laws of the world, while the
fruitfulness of woman is again honoured, and the idiotic nightmare of
Hell is replaced by glorious Nature whose travail knows no end. Leaning
upon modern Science, clear Latin reason sweeps away the ancient Semitic
conception of the Gospel.

"For eighteen hundred years," concluded Pierre, "Christianity has been
hampering the march of mankind towards truth and justice. And mankind
will only resume it