It is evident that we have reached a turning-point in the history of the world; that a crisis of terrible interest for the church, for Christian Europe, for peoples, and for nations, is at hand. It must, indeed, soon be decided whether Christianity shall continue to be, in the life of the nations, what from its very nature and design it is intended to be; whether it shall remain what it has been acknowledged to be since it overcame the heathenism of old, the light of the world, the supernatural leaven permeating all the relations of life, purifying and ennobling them; or whether it shall be cast out of public life as an illusion, and at most--and who knows how long even that?--be tolerated as a species of superstition. The nations--and especially the recently founded German Empire--must soon decide whether they shall accept as their basis the laws of eternal justice, whose root is in the holy and personal God, and in him alone; whether they will hold to that Christian civilization which reposes on the public recognition of Christianity, of the church as a divine institution not subject to the arbitrament of man; in fine, whether they will respect as sacred those prescriptive rights of mankind which every one must respect who believes in the divine government of the world--rights of which history is the evidence; or whether they will yield to the pressure of the revolution and of false science, throw Christianity and Christian civilization overboard, proclaim the present will of the dominant political powers or party the only and highest law of the state, and, having done this, to use their immense power to infuse this “modern” spirit and these “modern” principles into the life of the people, and force it on them by every means at their disposal, through legislation, government patronage, their system of public instruction, and the whole organization of society; in short, whether they will place naturalism and rationalism instead of Christianity, the vital principle of national and popular life, and thereby--no intelligent person can doubt it, for reason and experience conspire to teach it--hasten for the nations the inevitable catastrophe of which the burning of Paris was only a premonitory symptom.