Thus it has been since the earliest times, and it has been increasingly so all the time, until it logically reached in our time the dogmas of the transubstantiation and of the infallibility of the Pope, or of the bishops, or of the writings, that is, something absolutely incomprehensible, which has reached the point of absurdity and the demand for a blind faith, not in God, not in Christ, not even in the teaching, but in a person, as is the case in Catholicism, or in several persons, as in Orthodoxy, or in a book, as in Protestantism. The more Christianity became diffused, and the greater was the crowd of unprepared men which it embraced, the less it was understood, the more definitely was the infallibility of the comprehension asserted, and the less did it become possible to understand the true meaning of the teaching. As early as the time of Constantine the whole comprehension of the teaching was reduced to a résumé, confirmed by the worldly power,--a résumé of disputes which took place in a council,--to a symbol of faith, in which it says, I believe in so and so, and so and so, and finally, in the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church, that is, in the infallibility of those persons who call themselves the church, so that everything was reduced to this, that a man no longer believes in God, nor in Christ, as they have been revealed to him, but in what the church commands him to believe. But the church is holy,--the church was founded by Christ. God could not have left it to men to give an arbitrary interpretation to His teaching,--and so He established the church. All these expositions are to such an extent unjust and bold that one feels some compunction in overthrowing them. There is nothing but the assertion of the churches to show that God or Christ founded anything resembling what the churchmen understand by church. In the Gospel there is an indication against the church, as an external authority, and this indication is most obvious and clear in that place where it says that Christ's disciples should not call any one teachers and fathers. But nowhere is there anything said about the establishment of what the churchmen call a church. In the gospels the word "church" is used twice,--once, in the sense of an assembly of men deciding a dispute; the other time, in connection with the obscure words about the rock, Peter, and the gates of hell. From these two mentions of the word "church," which has the meaning of nothing but an assembly, they deduce what we now understand by the word "church." But Christ could certainly not have founded a church, that is, what we now understand by the word, because neither in Christ's words, nor in the conceptions of the men of that time, was there anything resembling the concept of a church, as we know it now, with its sacraments, its hierarchy, and, above all, its assertion of infallibility.