Church and State, without speaking of his Biblical apology for war, for the use of Louis XIV.?  How did certain doctors among the Roundheads, in their turn, set to work to proclaim the divine right of republics, and to ordain the massacre of the new Amalekites?  The method is very simple:  it consists only in confounding the law with the Gospel.  This confusion once wrought, the political and civil institutions of the Old Testament lose their temporary and local character, and we go to the New Testament in search of what is not there:  namely, political and civil institutions.

Though the Gospel is not the law, it is a truth which has been making its way since the seventeenth century, and which seems to be no longer contested to-day, except in the camp of the champions of slavery.  The Gospel, which addresses itself to all nations and all ages, does not pretend to force them into the strait vestments of the ancient Jewish nation; no more does it pretend to “sew a piece of new cloth on an old garment, else the new cloth taketh away from the old, and the rent is made worse.”  I speak here with a view to those who, in the law as in the Gospel, in the New Testament as in the Old, venerate the infallible word of God.  A revelation, to be divine, does not cease to be progressive, and nothing exacts that all truths should be promulgated in a single day.  If God deemed proper to give to his people, so long as they needed it, a legislation adapted to their social condition, this legislation, divinely given at that time, may be also divinely abrogated afterward.  And this is what has taken place.  Those who quote to us texts from the Old Testament concerning slavery, appear to have forgotten the saying of Jesus Christ in reference to another institution, divorce:  “It was on account of the hardness of your hearts.”  Yes, on account of the hardness of their hearts, God established among the Israelites, incapable, at that time, of rising higher, provisory regulations,[B] perfect as regards his condescension, but most imperfect, as he declares himself, as regards the absolute truth.  He who makes no account of this great fact will find in the books of Moses, and in the Prophets, pretexts either for practising to-day what was tolerated only for a time, or for attacking the Scriptures, indignant at what they contain.

It was Jesus Christ himself, therefore, who drew the line of demarcation between the law and the Gospel—­who announced the end of local and temporary institutions.  Has he revealed other institutions, this time definitive?  To form such an idea of the Gospel, we must never have opened it.  The Gospel is not a Koran.  In the Koran, we doubtless find both civil and criminal laws, and the principles of government; the Apostles did not once tread on this ground.  Fancy what their work would have been, had they substituted a social for a spiritual revolution—­had they touched, above all, the question of slavery, which formed part of the fundamental law of the ancient