There must no longer be a single school where they teach idolatry, where the wills of to-morrow grow bigger under the terror of a God who does not exist, and on whom so many bad arguments are thrown away or justified.  Nowhere must there be any more school-books where they dress up in some finery of prestige what is most contemptible and debasing in the past of the nations.  Let there be nothing but universal histories, nothing but the great lines and peaks, the lights and shadows of that chaos which for six thousand years has been the fortune of two hundred thousand millions of men.

You will suppress everywhere the advertising of the cults, you will wipe away the inky uniform of the parsons.  Let every believer keep his religion for himself, and let the priests stay between walls.  Toleration in face of error is a graver error.  One might have dreamed of a wise and universal church, for Jesus Christ will be justified in His human teaching as long as there are hearts.  But they who have taken His morality in hand and fabricated their religion have poisoned the truth; more, they have shown for two thousand years that they place the interests of their caste before those of the sacred law of what is right.  No words, no figures can ever give an idea of the evil which the Church has done to mankind.  When she is not the oppressor herself, upholding the right of force, she lends her authority to the oppressors and sanctifies their pretenses; and still to-day she is closely united everywhere with those who do not want the reign of the poor.  Just as the Jingoes invoke the charm of the domestic cradle that they may give an impulse to war, so does the Church invoke the poetry of the Gospels; but she has become an aristocratic party like the rest, in which every gesture of the sign of the Cross is a slap in the Face of Jesus Christ.  Out of the love of one’s native soil, they have made Nationalists; out of Jesus they have made Jesuits.

Only international greatness will at last permit the rooting up of the stubborn abuses which the partition walls of nationality multiply, entangle and solidify.  The future Charter—­of which we confusedly glimpse some signs and which has for its premises the great moral principles restored to their place, and the multitude at last restored to theirs—­will force the newspapers to confess all their resources.  By means of a young language, simple and modest, it will unite all foreigners—­those prisoners of themselves.  It will mow down the hateful complexity of judicial procedure, with its booty for the somebodies, and its lawyers as well, who intrude the tricks of diplomacy and the melodramatic usages of eloquence into the plain and simple machinery of justice.  The righteous man must go so far as to say that clemency has not its place in justice; the logical majesty of the sentence which condemns the guilty one in order to frighten possible evil-doers (and never for another reason) is itself beyond forgiveness.