[573] sects of the Reformation period, also construed their age as the Age of Reason, which is the last age after all the others are only preparatory. The same idea, then, was finally taken over by the proletariat, and the idea of the third stage of history^a, the final revolution^b, the revolution of the lowest class, which will abolish all classes, was the religious impetus behind the proletarian revolutions. And this is even the case in Karl Marx^c, who is usually accused by sometimes very questionable Christianity^d as "atheist^e," but who, in spite of his so-called atheism, was grasped by the idea of a completely secularized^f kingdom of God, which has very similar structures to the religious idea of the kingdom of God IN HISTORY, only in a secularized form without the traditional religious symbolism. For him, in SOME of his utterances at least, there was a kind of original communism^g---Urkommunismus, as he called it---or at least a state of things like in Rousseau^h, in which the separation of classes did not exist. Then, with the establishment of private property, the differentiation of classes started, and at the same time the tremendous economic development which Marxⁱ describes in the Communist Manifesto, almost in hymnic praises of the bourgeois society and its achievement. But at the same time, it was the period of the class wars, and now a third period will come: the classless society. This structure of thinking gave the religious impetus without which no strong movement can exist---if you interpret religion, as I do, as being ultimately concerned. In all these cases, the problem was the economic^j situation of the revolutionary^k classes. Fist the economic situation of the peasants, and partly the lower nobility, who also revolted