social to the divine. The whole history of the ancient nations, which lasted for thousands of years and which came to a conclusion with the history of Rome, is the history of the substitution of the social and the political life-conception for the animal, the personal. The whole history since the time of imperial Rome and the appearance of Christianity has been the history of the substitution of the divine life-conception for the political, and we are passing through it even now.
It is this last life-conception, and the Christian teaching which is based upon it and which governs our whole life and lies at the foundation of our whole activity, both the practical and the theoretical, that the men of so-called science, considering it in reference to its external signs only, recognize as something obsolete and meaningless for us.
This teaching, which, according to the men of science, is contained only in its dogmatic part—in the doctrine of the Trinity, the redemption, the miracles, the church, the sacraments, and so forth—is only one out of a vast number of religions which have arisen in humanity, and now, having played its part in history, is outliving its usefulness, melting in the fight of science and true culture.
What is taking place is what in the majority of cases serves as a source of the coarsest human errors—men who are standing on a lower level of comprehension, coming in contact with phenomena of a higher order, instead of making efforts to understand them, instead of rising to the point of view from which they ought to look upon a subject, judge it from their lower point of view, and that, too, with greater daring and determination the less they understand what they are talking about.
For the majority of scientific men, who view Christ’s vital, moral teaching from the lower point of the social conception of life, this teaching is only a very indefinite, clumsy combination of Hindu asceticism, Stoical and Neoplatonic teachings, and Utopian antisocial