One catches the _unholiness_ of Christian means _in flagranti_ by the simple process of putting the ends sought by Christianity beside the ends sought by the Code of Manu--by putting these enormously antithetical ends under a strong light. The critic of Christianity cannot evade the necessity of making Christianity _contemptible_.--A book of laws such as the Code of Manu has the same origin as every other good law-book: it epitomizes the experience, the sagacity and the ethical experimentation of long centuries; it brings things to a conclusion; it no longer creates. The prerequisite to a codification of this sort is recognition of the fact that the means which establish the authority of a slowly and painfully attained _truth_ are fundamentally different from those which one would make use of to prove it. A law-book never recites the utility, the grounds, the casuistical antecedents of a law: for if it did so it would lose the imperative tone, the "thou shall," on which obedience is based. The problem lies exactly here.--At a certain point in the evolution of a people, the class within it of the greatest insight, which is to say, the greatest hindsight and foresight, declares that the series of experiences determining how all shall live--or _can_ live--has come to an end. The object now is to reap as rich and as complete a harvest as possible from the days of experiment and _hard_ experience. In consequence, the thing that is to be avoided above everything is further experimentation--the continuation of the state in which values are fluent, and are tested, chosen and criticized _ad infinitum_. Against this a double wall is set up: on the one hand, _revelation_, which is the assumption that the reasons lying behind the laws are _not_ of human origin, that they were _not_ sought out and found by a slow process and after many errors, but that they are of divine ancestry, and came into being complete, perfect, without a history, as a free gift, a miracle...; and on the other hand, _tradition_, which is the assumption that the law has stood unchanged from time immemorial, and that it is impious and a crime against one's forefathers to bring it into question. The authority of the law is thus grounded on the thesis: God gave it, and the fathers _lived_ it.--The higher motive of such procedure lies in the design to distract consciousness, step by step, from its concern with notions of right living (that is to say, those that have been _proved_ to be right by wide and carefully considered experience), so that instinct attains to a perfect automatism--a primary necessity to every sort of mastery, to every sort of perfection in the art of life. To draw up such a law-book as Manu's means to lay before a people the possibility of future mastery, of attainable perfection--it permits them to aspire to the highest reaches of the art of life. _To that end the thing must be made unconscious_: that is the aim of every holy lie.--The _order of castes_,