history, lack of knowledge of all those vain attempts to realize in life the principles of the Sermon on the Mount, which have been made in history, and have led to nothing, thanks to ignorance concerning the whole significance of that high degree of culture on which European civilization now stands, with its Krupp guns, smokeless powder, the colonization of Africa, the government of Ireland, parliaments, journalism, strikes, constitutions, and Eiffel Tower.
Thus wrote Vogüé, and Leroy Beaulieu, and Matthew Arnold, and the American writer Savage, and Ingersoll, a popular American preacher of free thought, and many others.
“Christ’s teaching is no good, because it is not adapted to an industrial and commercial age,” naively says Ingersoll, thus expressing with absolute precision and naivete what the refined and cultured men of our time think about Christ’s teaching. The teaching is no good for our industrial age, as though the existence of the industrial age is something sacred which must not and cannot be changed. It is something like what drunkards would do, if, in response to advice about how to get themselves into a sober state, they should reply that the advice is out of place in connection with their present alcoholic state.