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>The very shape of the Divine had presented itself in anthropomorphic guise; it was the body of the quintessence of all-pitying Love, stretched out upon the cross of pain and suffering. A—symbol?—beckoning to the highest pity, to worship of suffering, to imitation of this breaking of all self-seeking Will. . . . In this, and in its effect upon the human heart, lies all the spell whereby the Church soon made the Greco-Roman world her own.
>What was bound to prove [the Church’s] ruin, and lead at last to the ever louder “Atheism” of our day, was the tyrant-prompted thought of tracing back this Godliness upon the cross to the Jewish “Creator of heaven and earth,” a wrathful God of Punishment who seemed to promise greater power than the self-offering, all-loving Savior of the Poor.