The age was different, the very world was different.

And if it were merely a question of retaining only such of the moral teaching of Jesus as seemed human and eternal, was there not again a danger in applying immutable principles to the society of every age?
No society could live under the strict law of the Gospel.

Was not all order, all labour, all life destroyed by the teaching of Jesus?
Did He not deny woman, the earth, eternal nature and the eternal fruitfulness of things and beings?
Moreover, Catholicism had reared upon His primitive teaching such a frightful edifice of terror and oppression.

The theory of original sin, that terrible heredity reviving with each creature born into the world, made no allowance as Science does for the corrective influences of education, circumstances and environment.

There could be no more pessimist conception of man than this one which devotes him to the Devil from the instant of his birth, and pictures him as struggling against himself until the instant of his death.