joy can ever be.
Man must be sustained in suffering by a hope so high that no conflict
with actuality can dash it--so high, indeed, that no fulfilment can
_satisfy_ it: a hope reaching out beyond this world. (Precisely because
of this power that hope has of making the suffering hold out, the Greeks
regarded it as the evil of evils, as the most _malign_ of evils; it
remained behind at the source of all evil.)[3]--In order that _love_ may
be possible, God must become a person; in order that the lower instincts
may take a hand in the matter God must be young. To satisfy the ardor of
the woman a beautiful saint must appear on the scene, and to satisfy
that of the men there must be a virgin. These things are necessary if
Christianity is to assume lordship over a soil on which some
aphrodisiacal or Adonis cult has already established a notion as to what
a cult ought to be. To insist upon _chastity_ greatly strengthens the
vehemence and subjectivity of the religious instinct--it makes the cult
warmer, more enthusiastic, more soulful.--Love is the state in which man
sees things most decidedly as they are _not_. The force of illusion
reaches its highest here, and so does the capacity for sweetening, for
_transfiguring_. When a man is in love he endures more than at any other
time; he submits to anything. The problem was to devise a religion which
would allow one to love: by this means the worst that life has to offer
is overcome--it is scarcely even noticed.--So much for the three
Christian virtues: faith, hope and charity: I call them the three
Christian _ingenuities_.--Buddhism is in too late a stage of
development, too full of positivism, to be shrewd in any such way.--

[3] That is, in Pandora's box.

24.

Here I barely touch upon the problem of the _origin_ of Christianity.
The _first_ thing necessary to its solution is this: that Christianity
is to be understood only by examining the soil from which it sprung--it
is _not_ a reaction against Jewish instincts; it is their inevitable
product; it is simply one more step in the awe-inspiring logic of the
Jews. In the words of the Saviour, "salvation is of the Jews."[4]--The
_second_ thing to remember is this: that the psychological type of the
Galilean is still to be recognized, but it was only in its most
degenerate form (which is at once maimed and overladen with foreign
features) that it could serve in the manner in which it has been used:
as a type of the _Saviour_ of