the certainty of police persecution should prevent every right-minded
man from at once doing on principle. The Socialists were naturally
shocked, being for the most part morbidly moral people; but at all
events they were saved later on from the delusion that nobody but
Nietzsche had ever challenged our mercanto-Christian morality. I first
heard the name of Nietzsche from a German mathematician, Miss
Borchardt, who had read my Quintessence of Ibsenism, and told me that
she saw what I had been reading: namely, Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut
and Bose. Which I protest I had never seen, and could not have read
with any comfort, for want of the necessary German, if I had seen it.

Nietzsche, like Schopenhauer, is the victim in England of a single much
quoted sentence containing the phrase "big blonde beast." On the
strength of this alliteration it is assumed that Nietzsche gained his
European reputation by a senseless glorification of selfish bullying as
the rule of life, just as it is assumed, on the strength of the single
word Superman (Ubermensch) borrowed by me from Nietzsche, that I look
for the salvation of society to the despotism of a single Napoleonic
Superman, in spite of my careful demonstration of the folly of that
outworn infatuation. But even the less recklessly superficial critics
seem to believe that the modern objection to Christianity as a
pernicious slave-morality was first put forward by Nietzsche. It was
familiar to me before I ever heard of Nietzsche. The late Captain
Wilson, author of several queer pamphlets, propagandist of a
metaphysical system called Comprehensionism, and inventor of the term
"Crosstianity" to distinguish the retrograde element in Christendom,
was wont thirty years ago, in the discussions of the Dialectical
Society, to protest earnestly against the beatitudes of the Sermon on
the Mount as excuses for cowardice and servility, as destructive of our
will, and consequently of our honor and manhood. Now it is true that
Captain Wilson's moral criticism of Christianity was not a historical
theory of it, like Nietzsche's; but this objection cannot be made to Mr
Stuart-Glennie, the successor of Buckle as a philosophic historian, who
has devoted his life to the elaboration and propagation of his theory
that Christianity is part of an epoch (or rather an aberration, since
it began as recently as 6000BC and is already collapsing) produced by
the necessity in which the numerically inferior white rac