The ideal is ever a Utopia.  When we wish nowadays to represent the Christ of the modern conscience, the consoler, and the judge of the new times, what course do we take?  That which Jesus himself did eighteen hundred and thirty years ago.  We suppose the conditions of the real world quite other than what they are; we represent a moral liberator breaking without weapons the chains of the negro, ameliorating the condition of the poor, and giving liberty to oppressed nations.  We forget that this implies the subversion of the world, the climate of Virginia and that of Congo modified, the blood and the race of millions of men changed, our social complications restored to a chimerical simplicity, and the political stratifications of Europe displaced from their natural order.  The “restitution of all things"[1] desired by Jesus was not more difficult.  This new earth, this new heaven, this new Jerusalem which comes from above, this cry:  “Behold I make all things new!"[2] are the common characteristics of reformers.  The contrast of the ideal with the sad reality, always produces in mankind those revolts against unimpassioned reason which inferior minds regard as folly, till the day arrives in which they triumph, and in which those who have opposed them are the first to recognize their reasonableness.

[Footnote 1:  Acts iii. 21.]

[Footnote 2:  Rev. xxi. 1, 2, 5.]

That there may have been a contradiction between the belief in the approaching end of the world and the general moral system of Jesus, conceived in prospect of a permanent state of humanity, nearly analogous to that which now exists, no one will attempt to deny.[1] It was exactly this contradiction that insured the success of his work.  The millenarian alone would have done nothing lasting; the moralist alone would have done nothing powerful.  The millenarianism gave the impulse, the moralist insured the future.  Hence Christianity united the two conditions of great success in this world, a revolutionary starting-point, and the possibility of continuous life.  Everything which is intended to succeed ought to respond to these two wants; for the world seeks both to change and to last.  Jesus, at the same time that he announced an unparalleled subversion in human affairs, proclaimed the principles upon which society has reposed for eighteen hundred years.

[Footnote 1:  The millenarian sects of England present the same contrast, I mean the belief in the near end of the world, notwithstanding much good sense in the conduct of life, and an extraordinary understanding of commercial affairs and industry.]