church, and they pray and give alms to the poor, and drop the balm of consolation into the wounds of the afflicted, and believe they do all that the Lord commanded to do, and believe they are Christians.  No!  Some few may be, but their nation is not—­their country is not; the era of Christianity has yet to come, and when it comes, then, only then, will be the future of nations sure.  Far be it from me to misapprehend the immense benefit which Christian religion, such as it already is, has operated in mankind’s history.  It has influenced the private character of men, and the social condition of millions; it was the nurse of a new civilization, and softening the manners and morals of men, its influence has been felt even in the worst quarter of history—­in war.  The continual massacres of the Greek and Roman kings and chiefs, and the extermination of nations by them—­the all-devastating warfare of the Timurs and Gengis Khans—­are in general not more to be met with; only my own dear fatherland was doomed to experience once more the cruelties of the Timurs and Gengis Khans out of the sacrilegious hands of the dynasty of Austria, which calumniates Christianity by calling itself Christian.  But though that beneficial influence of Christianity we have cheerfully to acknowledge, yet it is still not to be disputed that the law of Christ does yet nowhere rule the Christian world.

Montesquieu himself, whom nobody could charge to be partial for republics, avows that despotism is incompatible with the Christian religion, because the Christian religion commands meekness, and despotism claims arbitrary power to the whims and passions of a frail mortal; and still it is more than 1,500 years since the Christian religion became dominant, and through that long period despotism has been pre-eminently dominant; you can scarcely show one single truly democratic republic of any power which had subsisted but for a hundred years, exercising any influence upon the condition of the world.  Constantine, raising the Christian religion to Rome’s imperial throne, did not restore the Romans to their primitive virtues.  Constantinople became the sewer of vice; Christian worship did not change the despotic habits of Kings.  The Tituses, the Trajans, the Antonines, appeared seldom on Christian thrones; on the contrary, mankind has seen, in the name of religion, lighted the piles of persecution, and the blazing torches of intolerance; the earth overspread with corpses of the million victims of fanaticism; the fields watered with blood; the cities wrapped in flames, and empires ravaged with unrelenting rage.  Why?  Is it Christian religion which caused these deplorable facts, branding the brow of partly degraded, partly outraged Humanity?  No.  It was precisely the contrary; the fact that the religion of Christ never yet was practically taken for an all-overruling law, the obedience to which, outweighing every other consideration, would have directed the policy of nations—­that fact is the source of evil, whence the oppression of millions has overflowed the earth, and which makes the future of the proudest, of the freest nation, to be like a house built upon sand.