aily bread on earth? And even
supposing that thousands and tens of thousands follow Thee in the
name of, and for the sake of, Thy heavenly bread, what will
become of the millions and hundreds of millions of human beings
to weak to scorn the earthly for the sake of Thy heavenly bread?
Or is it but those tens of thousands chosen among the great and
the mighty, that are so dear to Thee, while the remaining
millions, innumerable as the grains of sand in the seas, the weak
and the loving, have to be used as material for the former? No,
no! In our sight and for our purpose the weak and the lowly are
the more dear to us. True, they are vicious and rebellious, but
we will force them into obedience, and it is they who will admire
us the most. They will regard us as gods, and feel grateful to
those who have consented to lead the masses and bear their burden
of freedom by ruling over them--so terrible will that freedom at
last appear to men! Then we will tell them that it is in
obedience to Thy will and in Thy name that we rule over them. We
will deceive them once more and lie to them once again--for
never, never more will we allow Thee to come among us. In this
deception we will find our suffering, for we must needs lie
eternally, and never cease to lie!

"Such is the secret meaning of "temptation" the first, and that
is what Thou didst reject in the wilderness for the sake of that
freedom which Thou didst prize above all. Meanwhile Thy tempter's
offer contained another great world-mystery. By accepting the
"bread," Thou wouldst have satisfied and answered a universal
craving, a ceaseless longing alive in the heart of every
individual human being, lurking in the breast of collective
mankind, that most perplexing problem--"whom or what shall we
worship?" There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a
man who has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he
shall soonest find a new object or idea to worship. But man seeks
to bow before that only which is recognized by the greater
majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a right to be
worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that men agree
unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern of these
miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol of their
own choice, but to discover that which all others will believe
in, and consent to bow down to in a mass. It is that instinctive
need of having a worship in common that is the chief suffering