The man who, for a generation, has been called the prophet of a new culture, this _Friedrich Nietzsche_, is he not, then, precisely the apostle of this man of might and mastery, of ill-famed _Herrnmoral_, master’s morality, especially? Napoleon, his Messiah—do you think? Did he not gloat and glory over the time when the wild roving _blonde Bestie_ was still alive in the old Germans? Did he not worship the beast of prey, memorialize the murderer, stigmatize the morality of Christianity as a crime against life, because of its saying, Blessed are the poor and the sick, the peaceable and the meek? If, now, the word of this new prophet should make disciples, should even revolutionize the times, should we close our churches and stop our preaching, as the first thing to be done? For the churches preach goodness and love, not might and dominion; see in man child of God, not beast of prey. If all this were a partisan matter—for or against Nietzsche—I would have nothing to do with it. To join in the damnatory fulminations against this man, or to advertise mitigating circumstances for his thought, and to re-interpret the whole from such a standpoint, until the whole should seem less brutal and less dangerous—to do either the one or the other is not for me, but for those polemicists and irenicists who are adding to the gayety of nations in these otherwise heartbreaking times, by the high debate as to whether Nietzsche be both the efficient and the final cause of our present world war. Not to defend Nietzsche, not to condemn him, but to wrestle for a firm, clear, moral view of life in our seething times, this alone is most worth while, and this too is my task. But for all that, I do believe we must penetrate much, much deeper into this new prophet’s spirit than either friend or foe has yet done, if we are to win from Nietzsche a deepening of our own and our time’s moral view of life.