But I ask you: Where have there ever been better robbers and slayers in the world than such holy precepts?

Is there not even in all life⁠—robbing and slaying? And for such precepts to be called holy, was not truth itself thereby⁠—slain?

—Or was it a sermon of death that called holy what contradicted and dissuaded from life?⁠—O my brethren, break up, break up for me the old tables!

It is my sympathy with all the past that I see it is abandoned⁠—

—Abandoned to the favour, the spirit and the madness of every generation that cometh, and reinterpreteth all that hath been as its bridge!

A great potentate might arise, an artful prodigy, who with approval and disapproval could strain and constrain all the past, until it became for him a bridge, a harbinger, a herald, and a cock-crowing.