It is just not true that Christianity abhors master-morality and preaches a _Sclavenmoral_, a slave-morality. Yes it _is_ true of the cowardly and inert thing that men call Christianity, this religion of the study-chair and the barracks which can make use of no master, because it summons just those powers to rule whose whole strength consists only in the weakness of others. But there _is_ a Christianity which has been outright mighty force, outright master-instinct, this kingly Christianity, in whose presence a Pilate, and a Herod, with the entire host of their war-slaves, were feeble folk indeed; a Christianity of love and gentleness and meekness,—aye, aye, sir! But one can have gentleness in the heart,—and yet lay on with a club! That was indeed master-morality when the Son of Man made himself master of the Sabbath; when he with a whip of cords scourged the money-changers and mammonists out of the Temple! That was a force-man and a master-man who hurled his, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” against the weak heart of Peter. How would it do for our churches to have a new festival, a festival of “the stillest hour,” memorializing the “invention of new values, around which the world revolves, noiselessly revolves”? Noises enough, often enough _Höllenlärm_, have there been in our churches, are yet, God knows! But it is not noise that rules the world. It is stillness which ultimately is the spiritual and moral might of the men who will possess the kingdom of earth. What if even the history of peoples “feigns a surface,” wears a mask, for those who having eyes see not, having ears hear not? What if men mistake _Höllenlärm_ for messages of great occurrences in history, and on this account hold themselves aloof from those phenomena and experiences in which _something new_, a life of the heart, presses on to its birth-hour? Yet the human race will not always need or require noise and masks as its history rolls on. The more men kill what is really worthy of death, the less will they set out to kill each other. The more powerfully the will becomes conscious of its calling to master, the more strenuously men strive after greatness, human greatness, the more ridiculous will it come to seem to them in the course of time that the force of man should be sought in the force of his muscles, the mastership of man in the hoarded prerogative of powder and lead. The day will yet come—as come it shall—when we will estimate our life, not according to its noisiest, but according to its stillest hours. And then a great and pure life will be created by what is done in the heart of man. The Birth of a Poem (_Translated from the Russian of Maximilian Voloshin by A. S. K._)