Christian morality? Chance robbed of its innocence; unhappiness polluted with the idea of "sin"; well-being represented as a danger, as a "temptation"; a physiological disorder produced by the canker worm of conscience.... 26. The concept of god falsified; the concept of morality falsified;--but even here Jewish priest-craft did not stop. The whole history of Israel ceased to be of any value: out with it!--These priests accomplished that miracle of falsification of which a great part of the Bible is the documentary evidence; with a degree of contempt unparalleled, and in the face of all tradition and all historical reality, they translated the past of their people into _religious_ terms, which is to say, they converted it into an idiotic mechanism of salvation, whereby all offences against Jahveh were punished and all devotion to him was rewarded. We would regard this act of historical falsification as something far more shameful if familiarity with the _ecclesiastical_ interpretation of history for thousands of years had not blunted our inclinations for uprightness _in historicis_. And the philosophers support the church: the _lie_ about a "moral order of the world" runs through the whole of philosophy, even the newest. What is the meaning of a "moral order of the world"? That there is a thing called the will of God which, once and for all time, determines what man ought to do and what he ought not to do; that the worth of a people, or of an individual thereof, is to be measured by the extent to which they or he obey this will of God; that the destinies of a people or of an individual are _controlled_ by this will of God, which rewards or punishes according to the degree of obedience manifested.--In place of all that pitiable lie _reality_ has this to say: the _priest_, a parasitical variety of man who can exist only at the cost of every sound view of life, takes the name of God in vain: he calls that state of human society in which he himself determines the value of all things "the kingdom of God"; he calls the means whereby that state of affairs is attained "the will of God"; with cold-blooded cynicism he estimates all peoples, all ages and all individuals by the extent of their subservience or opposition to the power of the priestly order. One observes him at work: under the hand of the Jewish priesthood the _great_ age of Israel became an age of decline; the Exile, with its long series of misfortunes, was transformed into a _punishment_ for that great age--during which priests had not yet come into existence. Out of the powerful and _wholly free_ heroes of Israel's history they fashioned, according to their changing needs, either wretched bigots and hypocrites or men entirely "godless." They reduced every great event to the idiotic formula: "obedient _or_ disobedient to God."--They went a step further: the "will of God" (in other words some means necessary for preserving the power of the