you may talk,
venturing as did an article to hold out the delightful promise of a
perpetual war--"a war which will last after this war, indefinitely...."[22]
(it will come to an end, nevertheless--for lack of combatants!) ...
there must come a day when you will stretch out the hand of friendship,
you and your neighbors across the Rhine, if it were only to come to an
agreement, for the sake of your own business. You will have to
re-establish supportable and humane relations: so set to work in such a
manner as not to make them impossible! Do not break down all the
bridges, since it will ever be necessary to cross the river. Do not
destroy the future. A good open, clean wound will heal; but do not
poison it. Let us be on our guard against hatred. If we prepare for war
in peace according to the wisdom of nations, we should also prepare for
peace in war. It is a task which seems to me not unworthy of those among
us who find themselves outside the struggle, and who through the life of
the spirit have wider relations with the universe--a little lay church
which, today more than the other, preserves its faith in the unity of
human thought and believes that all men are sons of the same Father. In
any case, if such a faith merits insult, the insults constitute an honor
that we will claim as ours before the tribunal of posterity.

VIII. THE IDOLS

For more than forty centuries it has been the effort of great minds who
have attained liberty to extend this blessing to others; to liberate
humanity and to teach men to see reality without fear or error, to look
themselves in the face without false pride or false humility and to
recognize their weakness and their strength, that they may know their
true position in the universe. They have illumined the path with the
brightness of their lives and their example, like the star of the magi,
that mankind may have light.

Their efforts have failed. For more than forty centuries humanity has
remained in bondage--I do not say to masters (for such are of the order
of the flesh, of which I am not speaking here; and their chains break
sooner or later), but to the phantoms of their own minds. Such servitude
comes from within. We grow faint in the endeavor to cut the bonds which
bind mankind, who straightway tie them again to be more firmly
enthralled. Of every liberator men make a master. Every ideal which
ought to liberate is transformed into a clumsy idol. The history of
humanity is the