_What_, I put the question with all strictness, has really _triumphed_ over the Christian God? The answer stands in my _Joyful Wisdom_, Aph. 357: "the Christian morality itself, the idea of truth, taken as it was with increasing seriousness, the confessor-subtlety of the Christian conscience translated and sublimated into the scientific conscience into intellectual cleanness at any price. Regarding Nature as though it were a proof of the goodness and guardianship of God; interpreting history in honour of a divine reason, as a constant proof of a moral order of the world and a moral teleology; explaining our own personal experiences, as pious men have for long enough explained them, as though every arrangement, every nod, every single thing were invented and sent out of love for the salvation of the soul; all this is now done away with, all this has the conscience _against_ it, and is regarded by every subtler conscience as disreputable, dishonourable, as lying, feminism, weakness, cowardice--by means of this severity, if by means of anything at all, are we, in sooth, _good Europeans_ and heirs of Europe's longest and bravest self-mastery.". .. All great things go to ruin by reason of themselves, by reason of an act of self-dissolution: so wills the law of life, the law of necessary "self-mastery" even in the essence of life--ever is the law-giver finally exposed to the cry, "_patere legem quam ipse tulisti_"; in thus wise did Christianity _go to ruin as a dogma_, through its own morality; in thus wise must Christianity go again to ruin to-day as a morality--we are standing on the threshold of this event. After Christian truthfulness has drawn one conclusion after the other, it finally draws its _strongest conclusion_, its conclusion against itself; this, however, happens, when it puts the question, "_what is the meaning of every will for truth?_" And here again do I touch on my problem, on our problem, my unknown friends (for as yet _I know_ of no friends): what sense has our whole being, if it does not mean that in our own selves that will for truth has come to its own consciousness _as a problem_?---By reason of this attainment of self-consciousness on the part of the will for truth, morality from henceforward--there is no doubt about it--goes _to pieces_: this is that great hundred-act play that is reserved for the next two centuries of Europe, the most terrible, the most mysterious, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all plays. 28.