Powers, in order to
shoulder it for himself; when he no longer accepts the forces that
guide him, but creates them; when he no longer receives but freely
chooses the values, ideals, aims and authorities whose validity he
will admit; when he begets out of his own being the relations with the
divine which he means to serve. For the German people this moment,
this opportunity, has now arrived--or is for ever lost.

We have made a clear sweep of all authorities. The inherited
influences which we accepted unconsciously have dropped away from
us--persons, classes, dogmas. The persons are done with for the
present. The classes, even though they may still keep up the struggle,
are broken to pieces together with all the best that they contained:
mentality, sense of honour, devotion, training, tradition. We can
never reanimate them and never supply their place. Ideas and dogmas
have long ago lost their cogency; the power they wielded through
police and school, the power which we tried to prop up by a
blasphemous degradation of religion and by developing the church as a
kind of factory, is gone, and it would be a piece of mechanical
presumption to suppose that we can breed them again for the sake of
the objects they fulfilled. If we live and thrive, ideas and faiths
will grow up of themselves.

We must of our own free choice lay upon ourselves a certain
life-potency or faculty which we shall freely obey, and which shall be
so broad and so buoyant that thought and creation can grow out of it.
A deed without precedent only in its voluntary, conscious
self-determination: for other peoples in earlier days also accepted
these faculties, not indeed out of conscious choice, but from the
hands of prophets, rulers and classes. Thus theocracy was laid upon
Israel; the caste-system on the Indians; the idea of the city on the
Greeks; empire on the Romans; the Church on the Middle Ages; commerce,
plutocracy, colonial dominion, on the modern world; militarism on
Germany. For these imposed forces men lived and died; they had only a
mythical conception of where they came from, and they believed and
some still believe them to be everlasting.

A thunder-stroke of destiny has at once stripped us bare and has
opened our eyes. The tremendous choice is before us. Are we to reject
it, and, blinded anew, to resign ourselves to the casual and
mechanical laws of action and reaction, of needs and interests, and
the competition of forces? Are we to recov