“I understand, I prick my ears up again (ah! ah! ah! and I hold my nose). Now do I hear for the first time that which they have said so often: ‘We good, we are the righteous ’⁠—what they demand they call not revenge but ‘the triumph of righteousness ’; what they hate is not their enemy, no, they hate ‘unrighteousness,’ ‘godlessness’; what they believe in and hope is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication of sweet revenge (⁠—“sweeter than honey,” did Homer call it?), but the victory of God, of the righteous God over the ‘godless’; what is left for them to love in this world is not their brothers in hate, but their ‘brothers in love,’ as they say, all the good and righteous on the earth.”

And how do they name that which serves them as a solace against all the troubles of life⁠—their phantasmagoria of their anticipated future blessedness?