If in the Europe, and especially in the England of to-day, everybody has a right to every judgment and to every joy; if a certain slavish truthfulness to nature and reality, rawness and ruggedness, have well-nigh wrecked higher aspirations, and if everybody can press his paltry modicum of voice, of thought, of draughtsmanship, of passion and impudence to the fore, and thus spread his portion of mediocrity like dodder over the sacred field of Art; it is because the fundamental principles of the Christian faith are no longer latent or suppressed in our midst; but active and potent--if not almighty. It might almost be said that they have reared a special instinct--the instinct of liberty and of taking liberties, without any particular aim or purpose; and, by so doing, have thrown all virtue, all merit, all ambition, not on the side of culture, but on the side of that "free personality"[34] and rude naturalness, or truth to man's original savagery, which it seems the triumph of every one, great or small, to produce. No one any longer claims the kind of freedom that Pope Paul III claimed for his protégé Benvenuto Cellini:[35] this would be too dangerous, because, in a trice, it would be applied to all. Therefore the insignificant majority get more freedom than is good for them, and the noble minority are deprived of their birthright. "Thus do I speak unto you in parable," cries Zarathustra, "ye who make the soul giddy, ye preachers of _equality_! Tarantulas are ye unto me, and secretly revengeful ones! "But I will soon bring your hiding-places to the light, therefore do I laugh in your faces my laughter of the height. "And 'Will to Equality'--that itself shall henceforth be the name of virtue; and against all that hath power will we raise an outcry! "Ye preachers of equality, the tyrant frenzy of impotence crieth thus in you for 'equality': your most secret tyrant longings disguise themselves in words of virtue!"[36] And now recapitulating a moment, what have we found our heritage to consist of, in the realm of the religious spirit? In the first place: a certain universal acknowledgment and claim of liberty, which has no special purpose or direction, and which is too fair to some and unfair to many. Secondly, a devotion to a truth that could be general, which perforce has reduced us to vulgar reality; thirdly, a prevailing depression in the value and dignity of man, resulting from the suspicion that has been cast upon all authority and all loftiness; and fourthly, a wanton desecrating and befingering of all sanctuaries by anybody and everybody, which is the inevitable outcome of that amateur priesthood introduced and sanctified by Martin Luther.