"In union with Christ, therefore, we turn above all our loving eyes to God, feel the most ardent thankfulness toward Him, sink joyfully on our knees before Him."

These lines of the seventeen-year-old Karl Marx frame a departure point for a long descent in the relations between Christianity and the revolutionary tradition he founded. By the time Marx came into his own, with the "Critique of Hegel's Theory of Right," he already recognized the ideological content of organized religion and its role in class struggle. But he also recognized its emancipatory content as the "heart of a heartless world"; and Marx, and especially Engels, were to pay tribute to the revolutionary thread within the Christian tradition. For Marx, Christianity was an illusory product of a suffering world, the mental projection of alienated consciousness. It needed to be subjected to critique, but not otherwise attacked. Once classless society arose and real human history began, Christianity was expected to wither away like other archaic institutions.