er, and to it belong the intentions of becoming
good, noble, loving, and so forth."

The dominion of the idea, whether it is religious or humanitarian or
moral, is for Stirner mere priest-craft; philanthropy is merely a
heavenly, spiritual, but priest-imagined love. Man must be restored,
and in doing so we poor wretches have ruined ourselves. It is the same
ecclesiastic principle as that celebrated motto, _Fiat justitia,
pereat mundus_; humanity and justice are ideas and ghosts to which
everything is sacrificed. The enthusiast for humanity leaves out of
consideration persons as far as his enthusiasm extends, and walks in a
vague ideal of sacred interest. Humanity is not a person but an
ideal--an imagination.

All progress of public opinion or emancipation of the human mind, as
hitherto proceeding, is accordingly for Stirner worthless labour, a
mere scene-shifting. As Christianity not only did not free mankind
from the power of ancient spectres, but rather strengthened and
increased them, so too the Reformation did not remove the chains of
mankind a hair's-breadth. "Because Protestantism broke down the
medieval hierarchy, the opinion gained ground that hierarchy in
general had been broken down by it, while it was quite overlooked that
the Reformation was even a restoration of a worn-out hierarchy. The
hierarchy of the middle ages had been only a feeble one, since it had
to allow all possible barbarity to persons to go on unchecked with it,
and the Reformation first steeled the strength of the hierarchy. When
Bruno Bauer said: 'As the Reformation was principally the abstract
separation of the religious principle from art, government, and
science, and thus was its liberation from those powers with which it
had been connected in the antiquity of the Church and in the hierarchy
of the middle ages, so also the theological and ecclesiastical
movements that proceeded from the Reformation were only the logical
carrying out of this abstraction or separation of the religious
principle from other powers of humanity';--and so I see on the
contrary that which is right, and think that rule of the mind or
mental freedom (which comes to the same thing) has never been before
so comprehensive and powerful as at the present time, because now,
instead of separating the religious principle from art, government,
and science, it is rather raised entirely from the kingdom of this
world into the realm of the spirit and made religious."

From