the early Church as it is now taught by the Roman Catholics,
has long been the stumbling-block to Protestants. It was
the very essence of Christianity itself. Unless the body could
be purified, the soul could not be saved; or, rather, as from
the beginning, soul and flesh were one man and inseparable,
without his flesh, man was lost, or would cease to be. But
the natural organization of the flesh was infected, and unless
organization could begin again from a new original, no pure
material substance could exist at all. He, therefore, by whom
God had first made the world, entered into the womb of the
Virgin in the form (so to speak) of a new organic cell, and
around it, through the virtue of His creative energy, a
material body grew again of the substance of His mother,
pure of taint and clean as the first body of the first man when
it passed out under His hand in the beginning of all things."

Throughout his essay on the Philosophy of Christianity,
where he was maintaining a thesis odious to the majority of
his readers, he rings as hard as ever. The philosophy of
Christianity is frankly declared to be Catholicism and
Catholicism alone; the truth of Christianity is denied. It is called
a thing "worn and old" even in Luther's time (upon page 194),
and he definitely prophesies a period when "our posterity"
shall learn "to despise the miserable fabric which Luther
stitched together out of its tatters."

His judgments are short, violent, compressed. They are
not the judgments of balance. They are final not as a goal
reached is final, but as a death-wound delivered. He throws
out sentences which all the world can see to be insufficient