[926W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 77-78]
[P. 77] {anti-FEUER/NIET} {SCHOP} “That a heartfelt, truly blest relation to Christ’s precepts exists among the generality of present Christians, is certainly not so easy to aver. The educated doubts, the common man despairs. Science makes God the Creator more impossible each day; but from the beginning of the Church the God revealed to us by Jesus has been converted by Theologians from a most sublime reality into an ever less intelligible problem. That the God of our Saviour should have been identified with the tribal god of Israel, is one of the most terrible confusions in all world-history; it has avenged itself in every age, and avenges itself to-day by the more and more outspoken atheism of the coarsest, as the finest minds. [P. 78] (…) And it almost seems right that Jehova at last should quite suppress the God so monstrously mistakenly derived from him. If Jesus is proclaimed Jehova’s son, then every Jewish rabbi can triumphantly confute all Christian theology, as has happened indeed in every age. (…) Historical criticism … casts in its lot with Judaism, and, just like every Jew, it wonders that the bells on Sunday morn should still be ringing for a Jew once crucified two thousand years ago. How often and minutely have the Gospels been critically searched, their origin and compilation exposed beyond a doubt; so that one might have thought the very evidence for the spuriousness and irrelevance of their contradictory matter would at last have opened the eyes of Criticism to the lofty figure of the Redeemer and his work.” [926W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 77-78]
[927W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 79]
[P. 79] {anti-FEUER/NIET} “We may console ourselves that after all there are two varieties of the critical mind, two methods of the science of comprehension.” [927W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 79]
[928W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 79]
[P. 79] {FEUER} “Is it so utterly impossible to Theology, to take the great step that would grant to Science its irrefutable truths through surrender of Jehova, and to the Christian world its pure God revealed in Jesus the only?” [928W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 79]
[929W-{3-7/78} Public and Popularity: PW Vol. VI, p. 80-81]
[P. 80] {anti-FEUER/NIET} “Can one imagine the state of barbarism at which we shall have arrived, if our social system continues for another six-hundred years or so in the footsteps of the declining Roman world-dominion? I believe that the Saviour’s second advent, expected by the earliest Christians in their lifetime, and later cherished as a mystic dogma, might have a meaning for that future date, and perchance amid occurrences not totally unlike those sketched in the Apocalypse. For, in the conceivable event of a relapse of our whole Culture into barbarism, we may take one thing for granted: namely, that our Historical science, our criticism and chemistry of knowledge would also have come to an end; whilst it may be hoped, on the contrary, that Theology would by then have come to a final agreement with the Gospels, and the free [P. 81] understanding of Revelation be opened to us without Jehovaistic subtleties – for which event the Saviour promised us his coming back.
