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Holbach's company constituted a regular plot against the traditional doctrine and the existing system, and its members were as fanatical on behalf of their unbelief as monks and priests, Jesuits and Pietists, Methodists, missionary and Bible societies, commonly are for mechanical worship and orthodoxy.
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behaves, who to-day often thinks he is through with God and throws off Christianity as a bygone thing. If you ask him whether he has ever doubted that the copulation of brother and sister is incest, that monogamy is the truth of marriage, that filial piety is a sacred duty, etc., then a moral shudder will come over him at the conception of one's being allowed to touch his sister as wife also, etc. And whence this shudder? Because he _believes_ in those moral commandments. This moral _faith_ is deeply rooted in his breast. Much as he rages against the _pious_ Christians, he himself has nevertheless as thoroughly remained a Christian,--to wit, a _moral_ Christian. In the form of morality Christianity holds him a prisoner, and a prisoner under _faith_. Monogamy is to be something sacred, and he who may live in bigamy is punished as a _criminal_; he who commits incest suffers as a _criminal_. Those who are always crying that religion is not to be regarded in the State, and the Jew is to be a citizen equally with the Christian, show themselves in accord with this. Is not this of incest and monogamy a _dogma of faith_? Touch it, and you will learn by experience how this moral man is a _hero of faith_ too, not less than Krummacher, not less than Philip II. These fight for the faith of the Church, he for the faith of the State, or the moral laws of the State; for articles of faith, both condemn him who acts otherwise than _their faith_ will allow. The brand of
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is stamped upon him, and he may languish in reformatories, in jails. Moral faith is as fanatical as religious faith! They call that
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then, when brother and sister, on account of a relation that they should have settled with their
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are thrown into prison.
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But they set a pernicious example. Yes, indeed: others might have taken the notion that the State had no business to meddle with their relation, and thereupon
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would go to ruin. So then the religious heroes of faith are zealous for the
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the moral ones for the
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from the Philalethes, the Friends of Light, the Rationalists, etc. And yet, how utterly unessential is this difference! If one buffets single traditional truths (_e. g._ miracles, unlimited power of princes, etc.), then the rationalists buffet them too, and only the old-style believers wail. But, if one buffets truth itself, he immediately has both, as _believers_, for opponents. So with moralities; the strict believers are relentless, the clearer heads are more tolerant. But he who attacks morality itself gets both to deal with.
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Truth, morality, justice, light, etc., are to be and remain
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What any one finds to censure in Christianity is simply supposed to be
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according to the view of these rationalists; but Christianity must remain a fixture, to buffet it is outrageous,