"Well, you know this much: no people, no State, can be free, at least we have no historical instance to the contrary, no people, no State, can be free without a positive Church; there must be something immovably fixed, and at this very day the Americans are free, only because they subject themselves to religion."
"Or, rather, enfranchise it," Eric interposed, without being heard.
"I think that you desire to make a free man of this youth. We also love free men, we want free men, but there can be no free men without a positive religion, and, in truth, without one requiring a strict, legal obedience. The highest result of education is equanimity--note it well--equanimity. Can your world-wisdom produce a harmony of all the tendencies and dispositions of the soul, a quietude of the spirit, a state of self-renunciation, because our whole life is one continual act of self-sacrifice? If you can produce the same result as religion, then, justified by the result, you agree with us. For my own part, I doubt whether you can; and we wait for the proof, which you have yet to give, while we have furnished it now for a thousand years, and still daily furnish it."
"Religion," replied Eric, "is a concomitant of civilization; but it is not the whole of civilization, and this is the distinction between us and the ecclesiastics. But we are not to blame for the opposition between science and religion."
"Science," interposed the priest, "has nothing to do with the eternal life. Although one has electric telegraphs and sewing machines, that has no relation to the eternal life. This eternal life is given only by religion, and its essence remains the same, no matter how many thousand, and thousand upon thousand, inventions he may devise in his finite existence."
"But how can the Church itself possess riches?"
"The Church does not possess, it only administers," the priest sharply answered.
"I think that we are getting too far away from the point," Eric said, coming back to the subject. "As we cannot expect that Herr Sonnenkamp and his son Roland will give away all their property, the question returns, how shall we get the right hold?"
"Precisely so," cried the ecclesiastic, suddenly standing up, and walking with long strides up and down the room. "Precisely so; now are we on the very point. Hear me attentively. Observe well, there is something new started in the world, a still more homeless condition yet in the higher moral order, and that is the moneyed aristocracy. You look at me in amazement."