The Good and the Good Conscience. – You hold that all good things have at all times had a good conscience? Science, which is certainly a very good thing, has come into the world without such a conscience and quite free from all pathos, rather clandestinely, by roundabout ways, walking with shrouded or masked face like a sinner, and always with the feeling at least of being a smuggler. Good conscience has bad conscience for its stepping-stone, not for its opposite. For all that is good has at one time been new and consequently strange, against morals, immoral, and has gnawed like a worm at the heart of the fortunate discoverer.
Success Sanctifies the Intentions. – We should not shrink from treading the road to a virtue, even when we see clearly that nothing but egotism, and accordingly utility, personal comfort, fear, considerations of health, reputation, or glory, are the impelling motives. These motives are styled ignoble and selfish. Very well, but if they stimulate us to some virtue – for example, self-denial, dutifulness, order, thrift, measure, and moderation – let us listen to them, whatever their epithets may be! For if we reach the goal to which they summon us, then the virtue we have attained, by means of the pure air it makes us breathe and the spiritual well-being it communicates, ennobles the remoter impulses of our action, and afterwards we no longer perform those actions from the same coarse motives that inspired us before. – Education should therefore force the virtues on the pupil, as far as possible, according to his disposition. Then virtue, the sunshine and summer atmosphere of the soul, can contribute her own share of work and add mellowness and sweetness.
Dabblers in Christianity, not Christians. – So that is your Christianity! – To annoy humanity you praise “God and His Saints,” and again when you want to praise humanity you go so far that God and His Saints must be annoyed. – I wish you would at least learn Christian manners, as you are so deficient in the civility of the Christian heart.
The Religious and Irreligious Impression of Nature. – A true believer must be to us an object of veneration, but the same holds good of a true, sincere, convinced unbeliever. With men of the latter stamp we are near to the high mountains where mighty rivers have their source, and with believers we are under vigorous, shady, restful trees.
Judicial Murder. – The two greatest judicial murders8 in the world's history are, to speak without exaggeration, concealed and well-concealed suicide. In both cases a man willed to die, and in both cases he let his breast be pierced by the sword in the hand of human injustice.
“Love.” – The finest artistic conception wherein Christianity had the advantage over other religious systems lay in one word – Love. Hence it became the lyric religion (whereas in its two other creations Semitism bestowed heroico-epical religions upon the world). In the word “love” there is so much meaning, so much that stimulates and appeals to memory and hope, that even the meanest intelligence and the coldest heart feel some glimmering of its sense. The cleverest woman and the lowest man think of the comparatively unselfish moments of their whole life, even if with them Eros never soared high: and the vast number of beings who miss love from their parents or children or sweethearts, especially those whose sexual instincts have been refined away, have found their heart's desire in Christianity.
The Fulfilment of Christianity. – In Christianity there is also an Epicurean trend of thought, starting from the idea that God can only demand of man, his creation and his image, what it is possible for man to fulfil, and accordingly that Christian virtue and perfection are attainable and often attained. Now, for instance, the belief in loving one's enemies – even if it is only a belief or fancy, and by no means a psychological reality (a real love) – gives unalloyed happiness, so long as it is genuinely believed. (As to the reason of this, psychologist and Christian might well differ.) Hence earthly life, through the belief, I mean the fancy, that it satisfies not only the injunction to love our enemies, but all the other injunctions of Christianity, and that it has really assimilated and embodied in itself the Divine perfection according to the command, “Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect,” might actually become a holy life. Thus error can make Christ's promise come true.
Of the Future of Christianity. – We may be allowed to form a conjecture as to the disappearance of Christianity and as to the places where it will be the slowest to retreat, if we consider where and for what reasons Protestantism spread with such startling rapidity. As is well known, Protestantism promised to do far more cheaply all that the old Church did, without costly masses, pilgrimages, and priestly pomp and circumstance. It spread particularly among the Northern nations, which were not so deeply rooted as those of the South in the old Church's symbolism and love of ritual. In the South the more powerful pagan religion survived in Christianity, whereas in the North Christianity meant an opposition to and a break with the old-time creed, and hence was from the first more thoughtful and less sensual, but for that very reason, in times of peril, more fanatical and more obstinate. If from the standpoint of thought we succeed in uprooting Christianity, we can at once know the point where it will begin to disappear – the very point at which it will be most stubborn in defence. In other places it will bend but not break, lose its leaves but burst into leaf afresh, because the senses, and not thought, have gone over to its side. But it is the senses that maintain the belief that with all its expensive outlay the Church is more cheaply and conveniently managed than under the stern conditions of work and wages. Yet what does one hold leisure (or semi-idleness) to be worth, when once one has become accustomed to it? The senses plead against a dechristianised world, saying that there would be too much work to do in it and an insufficient supply of leisure. They take the part of magic – that is, they let God work himself (oremus nos, Deus laboret).
Theatricality and Honesty of Unbelievers. – There is no book that contains in such abundance or expresses so faithfully all that man occasionally finds salutary – ecstatic inward happiness, ready for sacrifice or death in the belief in and contemplation of his truth – as the book that tells of Christ. From that book a clever man may learn all the means whereby a book can be made into a world-book, a vade-mecum for all, and especially that master-means of representing everything as discovered, nothing as future and uncertain. All influential books try to leave the same impression, as if the widest intellectual horizon were circumscribed here and as if about the sun that shines here every constellation visible at present or in the future must revolve. – Must not then all purely scientific books be poor in influence on the same grounds as such books are rich in influence? Is not the book fated to live humble and among humble folk, in order to be crucified in the end and never resurrected? In relation to what the religious inform us of their “knowledge” and their “holy spirit,” are not all upright men of science “poor in spirit”? Can any religion demand more self-denial and draw the selfish out of themselves more inexorably than science? – This and similar things we may say, in any case with a certain theatricality, when we have to defend ourselves against believers, for it is impossible to conduct a defence without a certain amount of theatricality. But between ourselves our language must be more honest, and we employ a freedom that those believers are not even allowed, in their own interests, to understand. Away, then, with the monastic cowl of self-denial, with the appearance of humility!