aws of this people are not their creation, but
positive revelations; how their chief requires privileged mediators
with his own people, with the masses; how these masses themselves are
split up into a multitude of special circles, which are formed and
determined by chance, which are distinguished by their interests,
their particular passions and prejudices, and receive as a privilege
permission to make mutual compacts (p. 56).

The separation of the "spirit of the Gospel" from the "letter of the
Gospel" is an irreligious act. The State, which makes the Gospel speak
in the letter of politics, in other letters than those of the Holy
Spirit, commits a sacrilege if not in human eyes, at least in its own
religious eyes. The State, which acknowledges Christianity as its
supreme embodiment and the Bible as its charter, must be confronted
with the words of Holy Writ, for the writings are sacred to the
letter. The State lapses into a painful, and from the standpoint of
the religious consciousness, irresolvable contradiction, when it is
pinned down to that pronouncement of the Gospel, which it "not only
does not follow, but cannot follow without completely dissolving
itself as a State." And why does it not want to completely dissolve
itself? To this question it can find no answer, either for itself or
for others. In its own consciousness the official Christian State is
an Ought, which is impossible of realization. Only by lies can it
persuade itself of the reality of its existence, and consequently it
always remains for itself an object of doubt, an unreliable and
ambiguous object. The critic is therefore quite justified in forcing
the State, which appeals to the Bible, into a condition of mental
derangement where it no longer knows whether it is a phantasm or a
reality, where the infamy of its secular objects, for which religion
serves as a mantle, falls into irresolvable conflict with the
integrity of its religious consciousness, to which religion appears as
the object of the world. This State can only redeem itself from its
inner torment by becoming the hangman of the Catholic Church. As
against the latter, which declares the secular power to be its serving
body, the State is impotent. Impotent is the secular power which
claimed to be the rule of the religious spirit.

In the so-called Christian State it is true that alienation counts,
but not the individual. The only individual who counts, the king, is a
being specially dis