To-day things are different. Four centuries of free thought and the unravelling of nature’s mysteries have left their mark on the human race. To-day even a Messiah cannot defy reason and nature, but is compelled to base his redemption on logical demonstrations, and to put his message in the form of a system founded on nature and experience. Essentially, indeed, everything is as it used to be: the real basis of Messianism, now as then, is faith in a speedy redemption, a faith which has its roots not in reasoned demonstration, but in the craving to be redeemed. But the exigencies of our age do not allow faith any longer to ignore the demands of reason and nature. Even faith is compelled to speak their language if it would satisfy the modern man. So we get scientific systems of a Messianic character, which, differing one from another, have all this much in common, that their scientific soundness is very much open to question, but leaves no doubt in the minds of the believers, who really need nothing more than the phraseology of science, as a seemly outer cloak for their faith. As the necessary phraseology is there, and the cloak is ready to hand, the believers hold on to the cloak with the utmost tenacity; every one of its threads is sacrosanct, and woe to him who disturbs a single one. They seem to feel unconsciously that if there is too much handling of their cloak, too much examination of its threads in the light of reason and genuine science, it will not be long before it is torn to tatters—and then what will become of their faith? Whence we find in all Messianic camps, to-day no less than of old, a fierce hatred of any attempt at criticism from within, and unlimited impudence towards those who stand without: but whereas this hatred and this impudence used to appear undisguised and unashamed, to-day they cloak themselves in reason and science, and so appear to be different. You must not think that X. is pilloried and jeered at because he has attacked their Messiah. Heaven forbid! Freedom of opinion is their first principle. No: his crime is that he has an axe to grind, and perverts scientific truth—which is, of course, solely and only that which is set forth for all time under hand and seal in this Manifesto or that Programme, and beyond it there is nothing.[68]