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118
THE EGO AND HIS OWN
wisely and rightly said: that man and woman should
be with each other is a natural law. Now, if it is a
natural law, then it is God's ordinance, therefore im-
planted in nature, and therefore a divine law also."
And is it anything more than Protestantism brought
up to date, when Feuerbach pronounces moral rela-
tions sacred, not as God's ordinance indeed, but, in-
stead, for the sake of the spirit that dwells in them ?
" But marriage--as a free alliance of love, of course--
is sacred of itself, by the nature of the union that is
formed here. That marriage alone is a religious one
that is a true one, that corresponds to the essence of
marriage, love. And so it is with all moral relations.
They are ethical, are cultivated with a moral mind,
only where they rank as religious of themselves.
True friendship is only where the limits of friendship
are preserved with religious conscientiousness, with the
same conscientiousness with which the believer guards
the dignity of his God. Friendship is and must be
sacred for you, and property, and marriage, and the
good of every man, but sacred in and of itself."*
That is a very essential consideration. In Cathol-
icism the mundane can indeed be consecrated or hal-
lowed, but it is not sacred without this priestly bless-
ing; in Protestantism, on the contrary, mundane rela-
tions are sacred of themselves, sacred by their mere
existence. The Jesuit maxim, " the end hallows the
means," corresponds precisely to the consecration by
which sanctity is bestowed. No means are holy or un-
holy in themselves, but their relation to the church,
* " Essence of Christianity," p. 403.
MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 119
their use for the church, hallows the means. Regicide
was named as such ; if it was committed for the
church's behoof, it could be certain of being hallowed
by the church, even if the hallowing was not openly
pronounced. To the Protestant, majesty ranks as
sacred; to the Catholic only that majesty which is
consecrated by the pontiff can rank as such; and it
does rank as such to him only because the pope, even
though it be without a special act, confers this sacred-
ness on it once for all. If he retracted his consecra-
tion, the king would be left only a " man of the world
or layman," an " unconsecrated " man, to the
Catholic.
If the Protestant seeks to discover a sacredness in
the sensual itself, that he may then be linked only to
. what is holy, the Catholic strives rather to banish the
sensual from himself into a separate domain, where it,
like the rest of nature, keeps its value for itself. The
Catholic church eliminated mundane marriage from its
consecrated order, and withdrew those who were its
own from the mundane family; the Protestant church
declared marriage and family ties to be holy, and
therefore not unsuitable for its clergymen.
A Jesuit may, as a good Catholic, hallow every-
thing. He needs only e. g. to say to himself : " I as
a priest am necessary to the church, but serve it more
zealously when I appease my desires properly; conse-
quently I will seduce this girl, have my enemy there
poisoned, etc. ; my end is holy because it is a priest's,
consequently it hallows the means." For in the end
it is still done for the benefit of the church. Why
should the Catholic priest shrink from handing Em-