It will thus be understood how, by an exceptional destiny, pure Christianity still preserves, after eighteen centuries, the character of a universal and eternal religion.  It is, in fact, because the religion of Jesus is in some respects the final religion.  Produced by a perfectly spontaneous movement of souls, freed at its birth from all dogmatic restraint, having struggled three hundred years for liberty of conscience, Christianity, in spite of its failures, still reaps the results of its glorious origin.  To renew itself, it has but to return to the Gospel.  The kingdom of God, as we conceive it, differs notably from the supernatural apparition which the first Christians hoped to see appear in the clouds.  But the sentiment introduced by Jesus into the world is indeed ours.  His perfect idealism is the highest rule of the unblemished and virtuous life.  He has created the heaven of pure souls, where is found what we ask for in vain on earth, the perfect nobility of the children of God, absolute purity, the total removal of the stains of the world; in fine, liberty, which society excludes as an impossibility, and which exists in all its amplitude only in the domain of thought.  The great Master of those who take refuge in this ideal kingdom of God is still Jesus.  He was the first to proclaim the royalty of the mind; the first to say, at least by his actions, “My kingdom is not of this world.”  The foundation of true religion is indeed his work:  after him, all that remains is to develop it and render it fruitful.

“Christianity” has thus become almost a synonym of “religion.”  All that is done outside of this great and good Christian tradition is barren.  Jesus gave religion to humanity, as Socrates gave it philosophy, and Aristotle science.  There was philosophy before Socrates and science before Aristotle.  Since Socrates and since Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress; but all has been built upon the foundation which they laid.  In the same way, before Jesus, religious thought had passed through many revolutions; since Jesus, it has made great conquests:  but no one has improved, and no one will improve upon the essential principle Jesus has created; he has fixed forever the idea of pure worship.  The religion of Jesus in this sense is not limited.  The Church has had its epochs and its phases; it has shut itself up in creeds which are, or will be but temporary:  but Jesus has founded the absolute religion, excluding nothing, and determining nothing unless it be the spirit.  His creeds are not fixed dogmas, but images susceptible of indefinite interpretations.  We should seek in vain for a theological proposition in the Gospel.  All confessions of faith are travesties of the idea of Jesus, just as the scholasticism of the Middle Ages, in proclaiming Aristotle the sole master of a completed science, perverted the thought of Aristotle.  Aristotle, if he had been present in the debates of the schools, would have repudiated this narrow doctrine;