"Strange as it may sound, the churches have always been not merely alien but downright hostile to the teaching of Christ, and they must needs be so. The churches are not, as many think, institutions that are based on a Christian origin and have only erred a little from the right way; the churches as such, as associations that assert their infallibility, are anti-Christian institutions. The Christian churches and Christianity have no fellowship except in name; nay, the two are utterly opposite and hostile elements. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life."[863] The church has "so transformed Christ's teaching to suit the world that there no longer resulted from it any demands, and that men could go on living as they had hitherto lived. The church yielded to the world, and, having yielded, followed it. The world did everything that it chose, and left the church to hobble after as well as it could with its teachings about the meaning of life. The world led its life, contrary to Christ's teaching in each and every point, and the church contrived subtleties to demonstrate that in living contrary to Christ's law men were living in harmony with it. And it ended in the world's beginning to lead a life worse than the life of the heathen, and the church's daring not only to justify such a life but even to assert that this was precisely what corresponded to Christ's teaching."[864] Particularly different from Christ's teaching is the church "creed,"[865]--that is, the totality of the utterly incomprehensible and therefore useless "dogmas."[866] "Of a God, external creator, origin of all origins, we know nothing";[867] "God is the spirit in man,"[868] "his conscience,"[869] "the knowledge of life";[870] "every man recognizes in himself a free rational spirit independent of the flesh: this spirit is what we call God."[871] Christ was a man,[872] "the son of an unknown father; as he did not know his father, in his childhood he called God his father";[873] and he was a son of God as to his spirit, as every man is a son of God,[874] he embodied "Man confessing his sonship of God."[875] Those who "assert that Christ professed to redeem with his blood mankind fallen by Adam, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and that it passes to the priest by the laying on of hands, that seven mysteries are necessary to salvation, and so forth,"[876] "preach doctrines utterly alien to Christ."[877] "Never did Christ with a single word attest the personal resurrection and the immortality of man beyond the grave,"[878] which indeed is "a very low and coarse idea";[879] the Ascension and the Resurrection are to be counted among "the most objectionable miracles."[880]