When we have seen this, we turn our backs on all and seek the only thing that holds, that gives a real answer, that fulfils what it promises. But this super-real fools call a phantom. =Hegel's Christianity.=--There are two Voltaires: one, the mocker at all definite religion, who is revered by the godless; the other, the fanatical champion of God who is ridiculed by the atheists because he believed in God as naïvely as a child. Voltaire recovered his reason before he died, as lunatics are wont to do; when he died he was definitely religious and took the sacrament. There are also two Hegels. But they are more complicated than Voltaire, who was as simple as a feuilletonist. Hegel discovered with his logic that what exists has a right to exist; he defends the _status quo_, society, state, religion with all their corollaries, because they have proceeded from God; everything is right since it exists. "It belongs," he says, "to the essence of religion that it should realise itself in several historical religious forms. Of these, however, Christianity is the only one which suitably expresses the essence of religion. In her doctrine of the Trinity the Christian Church contains the nucleus of all philosophical speculation. For this signifies nothing less than that the Eternal God, enthroned in His majesty over the sphere of the finite, condescends and reconciles Himself to the finite, becomes man, suffers, dies, and returns to Himself as the Holy Spirit." That is well put; but every schoolchild knew it already from Luther's "little catechism." For what object then is this extraordinary accumulation of several thousand pages of incomprehensible philosophy? To what purpose? Hegel died of cholera in 1831, after traversing many devious ways, as a simple, believing Christian, without any philosophy, repeating the penitential psalms. ="Men of God's Hand."=--That is Kind David's expression (Ps. xvii., 14) which he uses of the godless, to whom the Lord gave power over His people Israel when they behaved badly. Thereby is the knotty problem solved, why God gives the godless power, honour, and wealth, while He often chastises His servants. The Pharaohs were idolaters and wizards, but God's chosen people had to be their slaves. The Philistines worshipped Baal and Astarte, but they were allowed to devastate Canaan and even to carry away the Ark of the Covenant. Nebuchadnezzar was no saint, quite the contrary, but he was permitted to carry the children of Israel into captivity. Good men are not adapted to be instruments of chastisement, and the office of executioner is not an enviable one. Everyone has his Egyptian armed with a rod, whether they are called superiors, employers, customers, the public, newspapers, or even public opinion.