into. And,
_not_ to forget what is most important, it differs fundamentally from
every kind of Bible: by means of it the _nobles_, the philosophers and
the warriors keep the whip-hand over the majority; it is full of noble
valuations, it shows a feeling of perfection, an acceptance of life, and
triumphant feeling toward self and life--the _sun_ shines upon the whole
book.--All the things on which Christianity vents its fathomless
vulgarity--for example, procreation, women and marriage--are here
handled earnestly, with reverence and with love and confidence. How can
any one really put into the hands of children and ladies a book which
contains such vile things as this: "to avoid fornication, let every man
have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband; ... it is
better to marry than to burn"?[29] And is it _possible_ to be a
Christian so long as the origin of man is Christianized, which is to
say, _befouled_, by the doctrine of the _immaculata conceptio_?... I
know of no book in which so many delicate and kindly things are said of
women as in the Code of Manu; these old grey-beards and saints have a
way of being gallant to women that it would be impossible, perhaps, to
surpass. "The mouth of a woman," it says in one place, "the breasts of a
maiden, the prayer of a child and the smoke of sacrifice are always
pure." In another place: "there is nothing purer than the light of the
sun, the shadow cast by a cow, air, water, fire and the breath of a
maiden." Finally, in still another place--perhaps this is also a holy
lie--: "all the orifices of the body above the navel are pure, and all
below are impure. Only in the maiden is the whole body pure."

[29] 1 Corinthians vii, 2, 9.

57.

One catches the _unholiness_ of Christian means _in flagranti_ by the
simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the
ends sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously
antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity
cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity _contemptible_.--A
book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other
good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the
ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a
conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of
this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the
authority of a slowly and painfully attained _truth_