gar_
and _barbarous_--it absorbed the teachings and rites of all the
_subterranean_ cults of the _imperium Romanum_, and the absurdities
engendered by all sorts of sickly reasoning. It was the fate of
Christianity that its faith had to become as sickly, as low and as
vulgar as the needs were sickly, low and vulgar to which it had to
administer. A _sickly barbarism_ finally lifts itself to power as the
church--the church, that incarnation of deadly hostility to all honesty,
to all loftiness of soul, to all discipline of the spirit, to all
spontaneous and kindly humanity.--_Christian_ values--_noble_ values: it
is only we, we _free_ spirits, who have re-established this greatest of
all antitheses in values!...

38.

--I cannot, at this place, avoid a sigh. There are days when I am
visited by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy--_contempt of
man_. Let me leave no doubt as to _what_ I despise, _whom_ I despise:
it is the man of today, the man with whom I am unhappily
contemporaneous. The man of today--I am suffocated by his foul
breath!... Toward the past, like all who understand, I am full of
tolerance, which is to say, _generous_ self-control: with gloomy caution
I pass through whole millenniums of this madhouse of a world, call it
"Christianity," "Christian faith" or the "Christian church," as you
will--I take care not to hold mankind responsible for its lunacies. But
my feeling changes and breaks out irresistibly the moment I enter modern
times, _our_ times. Our age _knows better_.... What was formerly merely
sickly now becomes indecent--it is indecent to be a Christian today.
_And here my disgust begins._--I look about me: not a word survives of
what was once called "truth"; we can no longer bear to hear a priest
pronounce the word. Even a man who makes the most modest pretensions to
integrity _must_ know that a theologian, a priest, a pope of today not
only errs when he speaks, but actually _lies_--and that he no longer
escapes blame for his lie through "innocence" or "ignorance." The priest
knows, as every one knows, that there is no longer any "God," or any
"sinner," or any "Saviour"--that "free will" and the "moral order of the
world" are lies--: serious reflection, the profound self-conquest of the
spirit, _allow_ no man to pretend that he does _not_ know it.... _All_
the ideas of the church are now recognized for what they are--as the
worst counterfeits in existence, invented to debase nature and a