All of them have one adverse thing in common: They would tear up an old tree by its roots, and put in its place another tree equally as old and equally as rotten. There is something reactionary in all of them. They want to cure the present by the past. It is precisely this that cannot be done. If Christianity was once original, spontaneous, creative, it is so no more. We cannot lead an age back to Jesus, which has grown out beyond him. And the Buddha-religion is no more youthful and life-giving than the Jesus-religion. It is indicative of the depth of the disgust and the extent of the confusion on the part of the man of today that such a hoary thing as Buddhism can make so great an impression upon him. A revived, renascent heathenism, even as compared with Christianity, would mean a reactionary and outlived form of life. That men of moral endeavor and scientific vision could hope for a substitute for Christianity, a conquest over Christianity, in a rebirth of paganism, is a new riddle of the Sphinx. One way only remains out of the aberration and dividedness of our present life: not _backward_, but _forward_! No winning of a religious view of the world in any other way! No pursuit of the tasks of the moral life by those who seek a real part and place in the modern world, in any other way! Hence, a man is coming to be leader--a man who, as no other, embodies in himself all the pain and all the pleasure, all the sickness and all the convalescence, all the age and all the youth, of our tumultuous and tortured times: _Friedrich Nietzsche_!