conviction that mankind could be guided by such a naive doctrine
as that of the Sermon on the Mount proceeds from two causes: that
such a conviction is partly due to my want of knowledge, my
ignorance of history, my ignorance of all the vain attempts to
apply the principles of the Sermon on the Mount to life, which
have been made in history and have led to nothing; and partly it
is due to my failing to appreciate the full value of the lofty
civilization to which mankind has attained at present, with its
Krupp cannons, smokeless powder, colonization of Africa, Irish
Coercion Bill, parliamentary government, journalism, strikes, and
the Eiffel Tower.

So wrote de Vogue and Leroy Beaulieu and Matthew Arnold; so wrote
the American author Savage, and Ingersoll, the popular
freethinking American preacher, and many others.

"Christ's teaching is no use, because it is inconsistent with our
industrial age," says Ingersoll naively, expressing in this
utterance, with perfect directness and simplicity, the exact
notion of Christ's teaching held by persons of refinement and
culture of our times. The teaching is no use for our industrial
age, precisely as though the existence of this industrial age were
a sacred fact which ought not to and could not be changed. It is
just as though drunkards when advised how they could be brought to
habits of sobriety should answer that the advice is incompatible
with their habit of taking alcohol.

The arguments of all the freethinking critics, Russian and foreign
alike, different as they may be in tone and manner of
presentation, all amount essentially to the same strange