It is not within the scope of my task to inquire how far this traditional _schema_ of the upheavals at the tumultuous beginnings of our era coincide with the facts. Only one consideration concerns me at this time, and that one is not open to question: change as the phenomena of history may, the _laws_ of those phenomena remain ever the same. Accordingly, even the resistances which time’s new unfolding life has to surmount, ever return—usually under a changed name, indeed,—and they will continue to do so as long as there is a history of human culture in the life of the world. Passing on, now, to speak of the forces which the most modern prophet of a new culture, _Friedrich Nietzsche_, looks upon as the most grievous hindrances to a _new kind of man_, we shall surely expect to see first of all, quite other faces than those which the pious fathers of the old church saw in the foes of the _civitas die_; still, we shall re-discover, significantly enough, many an old acquaintance behind the strange re-modeled mask. As in that old day, so in ours, we shall perceive in these foes of a new life, nothing of their hostility to life. In part, they appear quite harmless; in part, they are the universally dined and wined celebrities of the day at whom the masses stare as the special pioneers of our culture, and in whom the masses applaud the bearers and promoters of the best achievements of our culture. It would be certainly a very one-sided and unhistorical way of looking at things were we to hold those particular individuals, who did duty in the olden days in synagogues of the scribe’s learning, primarily responsible for the warfare which ancient Christianity had to sustain against the dominant religious parties, especially against the scribes and their followers. The war was not waged against _persons_, but against a _system_. The synagogue was the _school_ of the Jews; the scribes were the _masters_ in that school. Viewed from this side, Christianity seemed to be rebellion against the authority of the school, and an emancipation of humanity from the influence which the toasted masters of the school exercised over spirits.