Yes, there are traces and traits of this ugliest man among us. If we but imagine all that is decoration, flummery, stripped off from us, think how much degenerate life would be disclosed! How much love for the dead _that no longer lives_, how much bitter strife and war over _reliques_, over some sacred cloak, or sacred bone, of which history narrates, telling us that they once belonged to life. How much slavish obedience to thoughts that once were; to institutions that once served the living. To be sure, men call this _piety_, and have thus designed a beautiful robe behind which they hide their moribund lives. For the sake of this piety, they exact consideration for all ancient dust which burden the homes and hearts of men, they arm themselves against him who, with mighty hand, would undertake a huge house-cleaning of life and for life. Piety,—it is this that they call admiration and veneration of every idol which for long has been played out, but still counts us of today among its devotees. Men must even deal God a mortal blow, the _Living_ God of the living, and, with the ferocious hatred of their folly, pursue the God who sees their innermost heart as a living witness of what they would like to hide from themselves and all the world. “But he—_had to_ die: he looked with eyes which beheld _everything_,—he beheld men’s depths and dregs, all his hidden ignominy and ugliness ... he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one had to die. He even beheld me: on such a witness I would have revenge—or not live myself. The God who beheld everything, _and also man_: that God had to die! Man cannot _endure_ it that such a witness should live.” Thus spake the ugliest man. Zarathustra started off, feeling frozen to the very bowels. The God who told men that altogether they served death, not life, that they worked deterioration, not rejuvenation—had to die! Life is a dying—and yet there shoots through the heart of man such a nameless anxiety in the presence of this dying that he paints up and pencils all death till it looks like life. And indeed many are deceived, many see only men’s rouge and mark not the great lie which it hides. This is the ugliest thing in the world, and it made the prophet of a new culture shudder and freeze—_this_, that we live and walk among corpses which yet look as if they were alive!