sharply challenge the learned imbecility which today maintains that theory. At the time when the sick and rotten Chandala classes in the whole _imperium_ were Christianized, the _contrary type_, the nobility, reached its finest and ripest development. The majority became master; democracy, with its Christian instincts, _triumphed_.... Christianity was not "national," it was not based on race--it appealed to all the varieties of men disinherited by life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity has the rancour of the sick at its very core--the instinct against the _healthy_, against _health_. Everything that is well-constituted, proud, gallant and, above all, beautiful gives offence to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of Paul's priceless saying: "And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_ things of the world, the _base_ things of the world, and things which are _despised_":[23] _this_ was the formula; _in hoc signo_ the _decadence_ triumphed.--_God on the cross_--is man always to miss the frightful inner significance of this symbol?--Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine_.... We all hang on the cross, consequently _we_ are divine.... We alone are divine.... Christianity was thus a victory: a nobler attitude of mind was destroyed by it--Christianity remains to this day the greatest misfortune of humanity.-- [22] The word _training_ is in English in the text. [23] 1 Corinthians i, 27, 28. 52. Christianity also stands in opposition to all _intellectual_ well-being,--sick reasoning is the only sort that it _can_ use as Christian reasoning; it takes the side of everything that is idiotic; it pronounces a curse upon "intellect," upon the _superbia_ of the healthy intellect. Since sickness is inherent in Christianity, it follows that the typically Christian state of "faith" _must_ be a form of sickness too, and that all straight, straightforward and scientific paths to knowledge _must_ be banned by the church as _forbidden_ ways. Doubt is thus a sin from the start.... The complete lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest--revealed by a glance at him--is a phenomenon _resulting_ from _decadence_,--one may observe in hysterical women and in rachitic children how regularly the falsification of instincts, delight in lying for the mere sake of lying, and incapacity for looking straight and walking straight are symptoms of _decadence_. "Faith" means the will to avoid knowing what is true. The pietist, the priest of either sex, is a fraud _because_ he is sick: his instinct _demands_ that the truth shall never be allowed its rights on any point. "Whatever makes for illness is _good_; whatever issues from abundance, from superabundance, from power, is _evil_": so argues the believer. The _impulse to lie_--it is by this that I recognize every foreordained theologian.--Another characteristic of the theologian is his _unfitness for philology_.