in the development of Christian doctrines, as Kopp and
Berthelot prove.

Feuerbach's declaration that the periods of man's development are only
differentiated through changes in religion is false. Great historical
points of departure are coincident with religious changes only as far as
the three world-religions which exist up to the present are
concerned--Buddhism, Christianity and Islam. The old tribal and national
religions originating in nature were not propagandist and lost all power
of resistance as soon as the independence of the tribe and people was
destroyed. Among the Germans simple contact with the decaying Roman
Empire and the Christian world-religion springing from it and suitable
to its economic, political and ideal circumstances, was sufficient. In
the first place, as regards these more or less artificial
world-religions, particularly in the cases of Christianity and
Mohammedanism, we find that the more universal historical movements will
take on a religious stamp, and as far as concerns Christianity in
particular, the stamp of the religion affecting revolutionary movements
of universal significance stopped short at the commencement of the fight
of the bourgeois for emancipation from the thirteenth to the seventeenth
century, and showed itself not as Feuerbach declares in the hearts of
men and the thirst for religion, but in the entire earlier history of
the Middle Ages which knew no other form of idealism than religion and
theology. But as the bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century was
sufficiently strong to have its own ideology suitable to its own
standpoint, it forthwith made its great and final revolution, the
French, by means of an appeal exclusively to juristic and political
ideals, and troubled itself with religion only so far as it stood in its
way. It never occurred to it to establish a new religion in place of
the old one; everybody knows what a mess Robespierre made of the
attempt.

The possibility of a purely humane sentiment in intercourse with other
men is with us today exceedingly impeded through the society founded on
class antagonism and class supremacy in which we must move. We have no
need to trouble ourselves about sanctifying these sentiments by means of
a new religion. And just as the circumstances of the great historical
class-fight have been obscured by the current historians, particularly
in Germany, so in the same way the understanding of the great historical
class-conflicts is