Surely it is not every one who is chosen to combat a religion or a morality of two thousand years’ standing, fist within and then without himself. - Oscar Levy

It had become an indisputable dogma that every expression in the same language must bear the same meaning in all peoples. And this was really the greatest affliction of the Select of that epoch, that they had to converse in the same tongue as the rabble, which had so often been desecrated in Parliaments, and assemblies, and lectures, and railway carriages; all of them, like Stendhal, would have given a great deal to have a langue sacre, comprehensible only by the few. All of them, like Goethe, allegorized meanings into their best works, in order to give the slip to prying snouts, and endeavoured to make themselves, as did Nietzsche, inaccessible, in order that “the swine might not break into the gardens.”

If I have blamed here Christianity, Christian morals, Christian humanity and helpfulness; if I have spoken ironically of all the lighter, minor, and female virtues this teaching has produced and still produces—I have done so in the name of those who have lifted themselves above them, who have outgrown them, who have acquired greater than Christian virtues.

We Neopagans … could even be mistaken for Christians, if our deeds did not differ so entirely from those of our more religious brethren. For we forgive those who have hurt us, we thank them for their neglect, we return good for evil, always supposed that the publication of an additional book is not an evil in itself. We even adapt ourselves to their wishes and tastes— we talk to them as they like to be talked to— we do not disdain to don the garment of Punchinello and make them laugh, where we perhaps have wept.