It is easy to point out the equivocation upon which this claim is based. The Church does indeed admit class distinctions. She exhorts the faithful to recognize and even to respect them, as something imposed by God upon a fallen world. She also exhorts the privileged to accept their situation, to carry out the activities it implies, and to perform ‘the duties of their state of life’. She even tells them that by performing these duties they are pleasing God and ‘making an act of prayer’. But the Church never exhorted them to glorify in themselves the feeling of this distinction, still less did she ever do so in the name of morality. On the contrary, she exhorted them in the name of morality to extinguish (beneath this privileged life) all belief in a particularity of essence in their persons, and told them to feel conscious of themselves in that humanity which is common to all men beneath the inequality of ranks and states of life.[73] Jesus Christ, the Church states explicitly and constantly, _only accepts the man who is reconciled_, i.e. the man who has obliterated from his heart every feeling of difference between himself and other men. (See Bossuet’s _Sermon on Reconciliation_.) It seems unnecessary to insist further on the unimpeachable character of this Christian teaching--I am speaking of teaching, not of practice. But one cannot meditate too much on the eagerness of so many modern Church teachers to try to find some means of sanctifying bourgeois egotism through the words of the Gospels.[74]