There is--or comes--in every man who is more solar than planetary, a lofty hour when his heart, amidst violent commotions and painful rendings, at last, by a lifting-up, suddenly turns round towards virtue, in an indescribable transition like that in which man lifts himself over from one system of faith to another, or, suddenly, from the highest point of wrath to a melting forgiveness of all faults;--that lofty hour, the birth-hour of the virtuous life, is also its sweetest hour, because it is to man as if his oppressive body were taken off from him; because he enjoys the bliss of feeling in himself _no contradictions_; because all his chains fall; _because he fears nothing more_ in the awfully sublime universe.--The spectacle is great, when the angel is born in man; when, thereafter, on the horizon of earth, the whole solar warmth of virtue falls upon his heart unobstructed by a cloud. But poor mortal man, the prisoner man, immersed in blood, encased in flesh, soon feels the difference between his raptures and his powers; he who was going to subdue the promised land, when its clusters of grapes came to meet him, hesitates, when he has to march against its giants (the passions). I do not, however, reject even the extravagance of that enthusiasm; Man, like buildings, must be _screwed up into the air_, in order to be _rebuilt_; a syllogism does not lead off the blood streams of our desires. It is singular that the devil in us must have alone the right to spend blood, nerves, beverage, passions, upon his military operations and for his imperial treasury, but the angel not.... So it is, however; men are vicious, because they look upon virtue as too hard, and they again become so, because they held it easier than it is. Not reason (i. e. conscience) makes us good: that is the outstretched wooden arm on the road to virtue; but this arm can neither draw nor drive us thither,--reason has the legislative, not the executive force. The power of loving these commandments, the still greater power of giving one's self up to them, is a second conscience by the side of the first; and as Kant cannot indicate with ink that which makes man bad, so neither can that be set forth which keeps his heart upright above moral filth or lifts it out of it. Who can explain the fact, if there are men who, from youth up, either possess or do without a certain sense of honor,--in the female sex this line of division is still sharper and more important,--if there are men who, from youth up either experience or forever live without a certain yearning for the super-earthly, for religion, for the nobler principle in man (and for systems which seal this nobler quality instead of disputing it)?----(With children a warm feeling for religion is often a sign of genius.) Man does not become good (though he does grow better) because he is converted, but he gets converted because he is good.