attack, but everything they attack is thereby _distinguished_.
Whoever is attacked by an "early Christian" is surely _not_ befouled....
On the contrary, it is an honour to have an "early Christian" as an
opponent. One cannot read the New Testament without acquired admiration
for whatever it abuses--not to speak of the "wisdom of this world,"
which an impudent wind-bag tries to dispose of "by the foolishness of
preaching."... Even the scribes and pharisees are benefitted by such
opposition: they must certainly have been worth something to have been
hated in such an indecent manner. Hypocrisy--as if this were a charge
that the "early Christians" _dared_ to make!--After all, they were the
_privileged_, and that was enough: the hatred of the Chandala needed no
other excuse. The "early Christian"--and also, I fear, the "last
Christian," _whom I may perhaps live to see_--is a rebel against all
privilege by profound instinct--he lives and makes war for ever for
"equal rights."... Strictly speaking, he has no alternative. When a man
proposes to represent, in his own person, the "chosen of God"--or to be
a "temple of God," or a "judge of the angels"--then every _other_
criterion, whether based upon honesty, upon intellect, upon manliness
and pride, or upon beauty and freedom of the heart, becomes simply
"worldly"--_evil in itself_.... Moral: every word that comes from the
lips of an "early Christian" is a lie, and his every act is
instinctively dishonest--all his values, all his aims are noxious, but
_whoever_ he hates, _whatever_ he hates, has real _value_.... The
Christian, and particularly the Christian priest, is thus a _criterion
of values_.

--Must I add that, in the whole New Testament, there appears but a
_solitary_ figure worthy of honour? Pilate, the Roman viceroy. To regard
a Jewish imbroglio _seriously_--that was quite beyond him. One Jew more
or less--what did it matter?... The noble scorn of a Roman, before whom
the word "truth" was shamelessly mishandled, enriched the New Testament
with the only saying _that has any value_--and that is at once its
criticism and its _destruction_: "What is truth?..."

47.

--The thing that sets us apart is not that we are unable to find God,
either in history, or in nature, or behind nature--but that we regard
what has been honoured as God, not as "divine," but as pitiable, as
absurd, as injurious; not as a mere error, but as a _crime against
life_.... We deny that God is God.