Page:Karl Kautsky - Ethics and The Materialist Conception of History - tr. J. B. Askew (1906).pdf/28

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ETHICS AND MATERIALIST CONCEPTION OF HISTORY.

most original and simple form of social indignation is the moral—the feeling of moral indignation, the feeling of the immorality of the existing institutions—so did every social uprising commence in the form of theological criticism, in which undeniably came, as an additional factor, the circumstance that the Church was played as the foremost means of class rule, and the Roman priesthood the worst exploiters in the Middle Ages, so that all rebellion against any form of exploitation always affected the Church in the first place.

Even after the Renaissance, at a time when philosophic thought had again revived, questions of Ethics remained for a very long time questions of theology.