We have said that one peculiarity of this work is the connection which is kept in view from the first between the Founder and His work; between Christ and the Christian Church.  He finds it impossible to speak of Him without that still existing witness of His having come, which is only less wonderful and unique than Himself.  This is where, for the present, he leaves the subject:—­

For the New Jerusalem, as we witness it, is no more exempt from corruption than was the Old....  First the rottenness of dying superstitions, their barbaric manners, their intellectualism preferring system and debate to brotherhood, strangling Christianity with theories and framing out of it a charlatan’s philosophy which madly tries to stop the progress of science—­all these corruptions have in the successive ages of its long life infected the Church, and many new and monstrous perversions of individual character have disgraced it.  The creed which makes human nature richer and larger makes men at the same time capable of profounder sins; admitted into a holier sanctuary, they are exposed to the temptation of a greater sacrilege; awakened to the sense of new obligations, they sometimes lose their simple respect for the old ones; saints that have resisted the subtlest temptations sometimes begin again, as it were, by yielding without a struggle to the coarsest; hypocrisy has become tenfold more ingenious and better supplied with disguises; in short, human nature has inevitably developed downwards as well as upwards, and if the Christian ages be compared with those of heathenism, they are found worse as well as better, and it is possible to make it a question whether mankind has gained on the whole....

But the triumph of the Christian Church is that it is there—­that the most daring of all speculative dreams, instead of being found impracticable, has been carried into effect, and when carried into effect, instead of being confined to a few select spirits, has spread itself over a vast space of the earth’s surface, and when thus diffused, instead of giving place after an age or two to something more adapted to a later time, has endured for two thousand years, and at the end of two thousand years, instead of lingering as a mere wreck spared by the tolerance of the lovers of the past, still displays vigour and a capacity of adjusting itself to new conditions, and lastly, in all the transformations it undergoes, remains visibly the same thing and inspired by its Founder’s universal and unquenchable spirit.

    It is in this and not in any freedom from abuses that the divine
    power of Christianity appears.  Again, it is in this, and not in
    any completeness or all-sufficiency....