The immediate consequence of this first principle was the rupture of the organic union realised in the Gospel of Christ between the religious element and the moral element. Nothing is more striking in the Sermon on the Mount and in all the Parables of Jesus, nothing better attests the superiority of Christianity to anterior cults, nothing proves with greater force and clearness that it is the perfect and definitive Religion, than that mutual penetration, that fusion, that identification, in a word, of religion and morality, till then separate and often opposed to each other. The Christ did not desire in religion anything that was not in morality, or in morality anything that was not religious. Thus did He bring back piety from without, and made of it the inner inspiration which penetrates and transforms the whole life, a hidden flame, a ferment acting from the centre to the surface, the soul in the body, ever invisible and everywhere present. He thus founded the absolute autonomy of the religious and of the moral life which no longer are divided, but appear simply as the two sides of consciousness; the one interior and turned towards God, the other exterior and turned towards the world. In creating in us the sense of our sonship to God, Jesus did not admit the intervention of any external authority between the Father and the child. The universal priesthood, with which, by His spirit, He invests the least of His disciples, excludes in principle all supernatural priesthood. "Call no man master on earth, for one is your Master in heaven; and all ye are brethren." The children must have free access to the Father.
But, from the moment the Christian principle, instead of entering as divine inspiration into the consciousness, sets itself up as a visible institution in society, it is evident that this organic union is broken, and the autonomy of the individual consciousness compromised. The religious element affirms itself on its own account, and imposes itself from without on the mind of the faithful as a divine authority. The ancient dualism, which the Gospel surmounted, reappears in a profounder form; it brings in its train a universal supernaturalism--that is to say, a mechanical conception of the relations between God and the world. Instead of a penetration we have a superposition of two elements. The clergy separates itself from the laity and superposes itself upon it as the necessary intermediary between earth and heaven. Religious society, constituted under the form of a government, superposes itself upon the civil society that it desires to rule; grace superposes itself upon nature, acting on it from above in the sacraments; the morality of the Church, in so far as it is a supernatural morality, superposes itself upon the natural morality of conscience; revelation upon reason; divine dogmas upon human science; the spiritual power of the priest upon the temporal power of the family and of the State. Everywhere, within and without, the division breaks out, and you see arise in man and in society an intestine struggle which will never end; for these two original forces that it brings into conflict, religion and nature, are equally powerful and eternal.