onsider the founder of
the Christian faith only as a great moralist, a benefactor of mankind.
We see nothing more in the Gospel than good maxims; we throw a prudent
veil over the strange intellectual state in which it was originated.
There are even persons who regret that the French Revolution departed
more than once from principles, and that it was not brought about by
wise and moderate men. Let us not impose our petty and commonplace
ideas on these extraordinary movements so far above our every-day
life. Let us continue to admire the "morality of the gospel"--let us
suppress in our religious teachings the chimera which was its soul;
but do not let us believe that with the simple ideas of happiness, or
of individual morality, we stir the world. The idea of Jesus was much
more profound; it was the most revolutionary idea ever formed in a
human brain; it should be taken in its totality, and not with those
timid suppressions which deprive it of precisely that which has
rendered it efficacious for the regeneration of humanity.

The ideal is ever a Utopia. When we wish nowadays to represent the
Christ of the modern conscience, the consoler, and the judge of the
new times, what course do we take? That which Jesus himself did
eighteen hundred and thirty years ago. We suppose the conditions of
the real world quite other than what they are; we represent a moral
liberator breaking without weapons the chains of the negro,
ameliorating the condition of the poor, and giving liberty to
oppressed nations. We forget that this implies the subversion of the
world, the climate of Virginia and that of Congo modified, the blood
and the race of millions of men changed, our social complications
restored to a chimerical simplicity, and the political stratifications
of Europe displaced from their natural order. The "restitution of all
things"[1] desired by Jesus was not more difficult. This new earth,
this new heaven, this new Jerusalem which comes from above, this cry:
"Behold I make all things new!"[2] are the common characteristics of
reformers. The contrast of the ideal with the sad reality, always
produces in mankind those revolts against unimpassioned reason which
inferior minds regard as folly, till the day arrives in which they
triumph, and in which those who have opposed them are the first to
recognize their reasonableness.

[Footnote 1: _Acts_ iii. 21.]

[Footnote 2: _Rev._ xxi. 1, 2, 5.]

That there may have been a contradictio