These observations on the more repellent characters of modern orthodoxy and piety may be taken as some reply to the sharp attacks to which I have been exposed for forty years, and which have lately been renewed with great violence. The spokesmen of Catholic and Evangelical beliefs, especially the Romanist _Germania_ and the Lutheran _Reichsbote_, have vied with each other in deploring my lectures as "a desecration of this venerable hall," and in damning my theory of evolution--without, of course, making any attempt to repute its scientific truth. They have, in their Christian charity, thought fit to put sandwich-men at the doors of this room, to distribute scurrilous attacks on my person and my teaching to those who enter. They have made a generous use of the fanatical calumnies that the court chaplain, Stöcker, the theologian, Loofs, the philologist, Dennert, and other opponents of my _Riddle of the Universe_, have disseminated, and to which I make a brief reply at the end of that work. I pass by the many untruths of these zealous protagonists of theology. We men of science have a different conception of truth from that which prevails in ecclesiastical circles.[10] As regards the relation of science to Christianity, I will only point out that it is quite irreconcilable with the mystic and supernatural Christian beliefs, but that it fully recognises the high ethical value of Christian morality. It is true that the highest commands of the Christian religion, especially those of sympathy and brotherly love, are not discoveries of its own; the golden rule was taught and practised centuries before the time of Christ. However, Christianity has the distinction of preaching and developing it with a fresh force. In its time it has had a beneficial influence on the development of civilisation, though in the Middle Ages the Roman Church became, with its Inquisition, its witch-drowning, its burning of heretics, and its religious wars, the bloodiest caricature of the gentle religion of love. Orthodox _historical_ Christianity is not directly destroyed by modern science, but by its own learned and zealous theologians. The enlightened Protestantism that was so effectively advocated by Schleiermacher in Berlin eighty years ago, the later works of Feuerbach, the inquiries into the life of Jesus of David Strauss and Ernest Renan, the lectures recently delivered here by Delitzsch and Harnack, have left very little of what strict orthodoxy regards as the indispensable foundations of historical Christianity. Kalthoff, of Bremen, goes so far as to declare that all Christian traditions are myths, and that the development of Christianity is a necessary outcome of the civilisation of the time.