"Resignation is the last thing a human thinks of. He thinks he is so clever, so intelligent, so inventive and especially so 'progressive,' that he will bend Ideals to his will, as he has done with a few of the physical forces of Nature. He does not know that while other goods require only the abnegation of one or a few individuals, Ideals exact the privation of multitudes.
"Could we free Greeks have been what we were, had we not stood on the bodies of degraded slaves who relieved us of the drudgery of life? One cannot be free and a slave at the same time.
"In my deep conviction of the heavy sacrifices demanded for Ideals, I frequently think that we Greeks, and more particularly myself, who introduced this thirst for Ideals into the world, have thereby done Europe more harm than good.
"How many a time has the fate of Prometheus been re-enacted in millions of ideal-smitten Europeans! There he is, bound to a rock, while an eagle eats his liver, because he wanted to bring down Olympus to earth.
"The Religion that will teach man serene resignation; that will imbue him with the sense of the magnitude of Ideals; that will make him feel that Ideals are not for man, but for gods; that Religion will save him.
"None other.
"The priests of that Religion must be the first to exemplify that Resignation to the full. They must not preach Resignation while themselves dressed in purple and clothed in the amplest rights of Precedence, Authority, and Splendour. Will there ever be such priests?
"I doubt it. What priests want and what they have always wanted, is nothing but authority.
"They have founded and brought to its most consummate expression the science of authority-seeking. They know how to impress people. I do not hope that they will ever give up such a profitable accomplishment; and consequently no Religion of the future will have a remarkable success unless it enables its founders to invest many persons with great authority.
"The scant authority it gives to its incumbents is the chief weakness of Protestantism as compared with Roman Catholicism. This world is ruled by Authority; and so far, the other world too has been governed by the same means. And so at the end, as well as at the outset of our reflections on Life we start and come back to the same eternal truth, that practical life wants not truth as such, but only effectology.