Quite apart from any elements of truth contained in Nietzsche’s ethics, the first reason for his popularity is, no doubt, the perfection of his form and style. Nietzsche is one of the supreme masters of language, in a literature which counts very few masters of language, and the beauty of his style is transparent even in the disguise of a foreign translation. The second reason is that Nietzsche, who imagined that he was fighting against the times, was in reality thinking with the times, and he has met with a ready response, in the dominant instincts of the present age, in the aggressive materialism, in the race for wealth and power. The Supermen and the Super-races of to-day only too cordially accept a philosophy which seems to justify extortion, aggression, and oppression in the name of a supreme moral principle. The third and most important reason, and the real secret of Nietzsche’s influence, is the fine quality of his moral personality. However much we may be repelled by the thinker, we are attracted by the magnetism of the man, by his noble courage, by his splendid integrity, by his love of truth, his hatred of cant. Even though he has himself misunderstood Christianity, he has done a great deal to bring us back to the fundamental ideals of the Christian religion. He has done a great deal to undermine that superficial and “rose-water” view of Christianity current in official and academic Protestant circles. He has done a great deal to convince us that whatever may be the essence of Christianity, it has nothing in common with that silly and pedantic game which, for half a century, has made Eternal Religion depend on the conclusions of “Higher Criticism,” and which has made theology and philosophy the handmaidens of archæology and philology. Nietzsche is a formidable foe of Christianity, but he is a magnanimous foe, who certainly brings us nearer to a comprehension of the inmost meaning of the very doctrines he attacks. And it is quite possible that the Christian champion of the future may incorporate Nietzsche in his apologetics, even as St. Thomas Aquinas incorporated Aristotle, even as Pascal incorporated Montaigne. It was in the fitness of things that Nietzsche should be the descendant of a long line of Protestant ministers. For, indeed, he is the last of the true German Protestants, ever ready to protest and to defy and to challenge. He is the noblest of modern German heretics. II.—MONTAIGNE AND NIETZSCHE. I. There is a continuity and heredity in the transmission of ideas as there is in the transmission of life. Each great thinker has a spiritual posterity, which for centuries perpetuates his doctrine and his moral personality. And there is no keener intellectual enjoyment than to trace back to their original progenitors one of those mighty and original systems which are the milestones in the history of human thought.