There is no occasion for much astonishment at this, or to charge upon the clergy an undue proportion of human weakness, or to imagine it a vice peculiar to the Christian church. It has a much deeper and more powerful origin. What does every religion lay claim to? The governance of human passions and of human will. Every religion is a curb, a power, a government. It comes in the name of divine law to subdue human nature. Therefore human liberty is its especial antagonist, which it is its object to vanquish. To this purpose is its mission and hope directed. {114} But although religions have to struggle with human liberty, and although they aspire to cast the will of man in a new mould, at the same time they have no other moral means of acting upon man than what he himself supplies, than his own will and liberty. When they act by outward means, as by force or seduction--in other words, by means other than the free concurrence of man-- they treat him as we would one of the elements, water or wind, as a purely physical or material power; and they fail in their object, for they do not thereby reach or influence the inclination. For religions really to accomplish their task, it is necessary that man yields himself up to them, but voluntarily and of his own free will, and that he preserves his liberty even amidst his submission. Religions are thus called to solve a double problem. This they have too often overlooked. They have considered liberty as an obstacle, and not as a means; they have forgotten the nature of the force to which they were to address themselves, and have acted with the human soul as with a material object. It is in consequence of this error that they have been led to range themselves on the side of power or despotism against human liberty, regarding it only as an adversary, and straining much more to subdue it than to procure it guarantees. If religions had well considered their means of action, if they had not given way to a natural but deceitful tendency, they would have discovered that their province was to strengthen liberty, in order morally to control it, that religion can, and ought to act only by moral influences; and they would have respected the free will of mankind, whilst applying themselves to direct it. This they have not done, and in the end the religious influence has itself suffered as much as liberty.