from that colossal edifice, turning against it all the meritorious, manly and noble natures that had found in the cause of Rome their own cause, their own serious purpose, their own _pride_. The sneakishness of hypocrisy, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell, such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the _unio mystica_ in the drinking of blood, above all, the slowly rekindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge--all _that_ sort of thing became master of Rome: the same kind of religion which, in a pre-existent form, Epicurus had combatted. One has but to read Lucretius to know _what_ Epicurus made war upon--_not_ paganism, but "Christianity," which is to say, the corruption of souls by means of the concepts of guilt, punishment and immortality.--He combatted the _subterranean_ cults, the whole of latent Christianity--to deny immortality was already a form of genuine _salvation_.--Epicurus had triumphed, and every respectable intellect in Rome was Epicurean--_when Paul appeared_ ... Paul, the Chandala hatred of Rome, of "the world," in the flesh and inspired by genius--the Jew, the _eternal_ Jew _par excellence_.... What he saw was how, with the aid of the small sectarian Christian movement that stood apart from Judaism, a "world conflagration" might be kindled; how, with the symbol of "God on the cross," all secret seditions, all the fruits of anarchistic intrigues in the empire, might be amalgamated into one immense power. "Salvation is of the Jews."--Christianity is the formula for exceeding _and_ summing up the subterranean cults of all varieties, that of Osiris, that of the Great Mother, that of Mithras, for instance: in his discernment of this fact the genius of Paul showed itself. His instinct was here so sure that, with reckless violence to the truth, he put the ideas which lent fascination to every sort of Chandala religion into the mouth of the "Saviour" as his own inventions, and not only into the mouth--he _made_ out of him something that even a priest of Mithras could understand.... This was his revelation at Damascus: he grasped the fact that he _needed_ the belief in immortality in order to rob "the world" of its value, that the concept of "hell" would master Rome--that the notion of a "beyond" is the _death of life_.... Nihilist and Christian: they rhyme in German, and they do more than rhyme.... 59.