Thus we comprehend how, by an exceptional destiny, pure Christianity still presents itself, at the end of eighteen centuries, with the character of a universal and eternal religion. It is because in fact the religion of Jesus is in some respects the final religion. The fruit of a perfectly spontaneous movement of souls, free at its birth from every dogmatic constraint, having struggled three hundred years for liberty of conscience, Christianity, in spite of the fall which followed, still gathers the fruits of this surpassing origin. To renew itself it has only to turn to the Gospel. The kingdom of God, as we conceive it, is widely different from the supernatural apparition which the first Christians expected to see burst forth from the clouds. But the sentiment which Jesus introduced into the world is really ours. His perfect idealism is the highest rule of unworldly and virtuous life. He has created that heaven of free souls, in which is found what we ask in vain on earth, the perfect nobility of the children of God, absolute purity, total abstraction from the contamination of this world, that freedom, in short, which material society shuts out as an impossibility, and which finds all its amplitude only in the domain of thought. The great master of those who take refuge in this ideal kingdom of God is Jesus still. He first proclaimed the kingliness of the spirit; he first said, at least by his acts, “My kingdom is not of this world.” The foundation of the true religion is indeed his work. After him there is nothing more but to develop and fructify. “Christianity” has thus become almost synonymous with “religion.” All that may be done outside of this great and good Christian tradition will be sterile. Jesus founded religion on humanity, as Socrates founded philosophy, as Aristotle founded science. There had been philosophy before Socrates and science before Aristotle. Since Socrates and Aristotle, philosophy and science have made immense progress; but all has been built upon the foundation which they laid. And so, before Jesus, religious thought had passed through many revolutions; since Jesus it has made great conquests; nevertheless it has not departed, it will not depart from the essential condition which Jesus created; he has fixed for eternity the idea of pure worship. The religion of Jesus, in this sense, is not limited. The church has had its epochs and its phases; it has shut itself up in symbols which have had or will have their day; Jesus founded the absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing, save its essence.… Whatever may be the transformations of dogma, Jesus will remain in religion the creator of its pure sentiment; the Sermon on the Mount will never be surpassed. No resolution will lead us not to join in religion the grand intellectual and moral line at the head of which beams the name of Jesus.—_Renan._[1] [_March 8._]