We are all Christians
That we are all Christians is something so generally known and assumed that it needs no proof but may even be about to work its way up from being a historical truth to becoming an axiom, one of the eternal intuitive principles with which the babe is now born, so that with Christianity there may be said to have come about a change in man, that in "Christendom" a babe is born with one intuitive principle more than a human being has outside of Christendom, the principle that we are all Christians.
For all that, it never can do any harm to make it clear to ourselves over and over again to what degree it is certain and true that we are all Christians.
Here is an attempt of mine; and I flatter myself that it really does make clear to what a degree we are all of us Christians. We are Christians to such a degree that, if among us there lived a Freethinker who in the strongest terms declared that the whole of Christianity is a lie, item in the strongest terms declared that he was not a Christian — there is no help for him, he is a Christian; according to the law he may be punished, that is a different thing, but a Christian he is. "What stuff and nonsense!" says the State. "What would this lead to? If once we allowed a man to declare that he is not a Christian, it soon would come to pass that all would deny that they were Christians. No, principiis obsta,10 and let us hold fast to principles. We now have everything well tabulated, all under proper headings, everything perfectly correct — under the assumption of course that we are all Christians — ergo he too is a Christian. Such a conceit, which merely wants to be eccentric, one must not humor, and that's the end of it."
If he dies...and leaves behind him so much that the man of God (the priest), the undertaker man, and several other men, could each get his share — then all his protests are of no use, he is a Christian and is buried as a Christian — to that degree it is certain that we all are Christians. If he leaves nothing (for a little is no help: the priest, who as a Christian is always easily contented, is content with little if there is no more), but if he leaves literally nothing — that would be the only case in which his protests might be taken into account, since by being dead he would be prevented from defraying the costs of Christian burial by corporal labor — to that degree it is certain that we are all Christians. It stands firm in "Christendom," stands as firm as the principle of contradiction outside of Christendom, it stands firm, this eternal principle, which no doubt is able to shake: we are all Christians.
Translator's Footnote
10From Ovid, "A Remedy against Love," where one is advised to "put a stop to it at the beginning."