To declare that Christianity is lying disjointed, in shattered fragments, and yet to pretend that human hands, with paste and glue, out of these broken pieces can remake the heavenly vase once filled with God’s spirit of faith, hope, and love, is an idle fancy. Into this patchwork no divine life will come; men will not believe in it, nor will it inspire enthusiasm or the heroic courage of martyrdom. Therefore they who leave the church, their native soil, have indeed all the world before them, and yet no place where they can find rest for their souls. What the religious policy of the Prussian Liberals is, Herr von Kirchmann, to whom in a previous article we introduced our readers, informs us in the following words: “The majority of the Liberal representatives are highly-educated men who have fallen out with the Christian churches, because they no longer accept their creed, and therefore hold as a principle that freedom of conscience for the individual is abundantly sufficient to satisfy the religious wants of the people. At best, they would consent to the existence of congregations; any organization beyond this they consider not only unnecessary but hurtful.” This, then, is the Liberal programme: the individual shall have perfect freedom to believe, as he pleases, in God or the devil; but there shall be no ecclesiastical organization, unless a kind of congregationalism, which, having neither unity nor strength, can be easily rendered harmless by being placed under police supervision. These men of culture, as Herr von Kirchmann says, have fallen out with all the churches; and they are liberal enough to be willing to do everything in their power to make it impossible that any of them should exist at all, since without organic unity of some kind there can be no church, as there can be no state. But let us hear what Herr von Kirchmann has to remark upon this subject. “This view,” he says, “may satisfy those who have reached the high degree of culture of the Liberals; but those who take it utterly ignore the religious wants of the middle and lower classes, and fail to perceive the yearning, inseparable from all religious feeling, for association with persons of like sentiments, in order, through public worship, to obtain the strength and contentment after which this fundamental craving of the human heart longs.” To the existence of this feeling, and its yearning for the largest possible association, the history of all Christian peoples, down even to the present day, bears witness; for this reason nowhere have men been satisfied with the freedom of the individual, but have ever demanded a church with acknowledged rights and the privilege of free intercommunion.