For the greater number of men in the ordinary situations of life the hardest part in the prolegomena of Christianity is perhaps the conquering of one’s desire for pleasure. The humbler classes often escape this desire with still less success than do the wealthy and the aristocratic, who may have learned, through experience, to place a better estimate upon the worth or worthlessness of the pleasures of the material life. One often finds in the lower classes a much more unrestrained passion for pleasure, which, joined with the atheistic mood they purposely cultivate, sometimes degenerates into a true savagery and makes them like animals, and animals not of the noblest sort, either. But unfortunately the upper strata of society often enough lead the way by their own bad example. They often complain of the love of pleasure and the frivolity of the serving classes; but things would go better if the servants did not perceive in their masters the same propensities that restlessly agitate them. Pleasure set up as a rule of life, sensuousness (taken in the widest sense) established as the controlling power in the life of a man--this is the infallible death of all faith in transcendent things. These two powers, pleasure and faith, do not long exist side by side in a man, but the one or the other must leave the field. Happy he in whom it is the power of the sensual element that retreats before that of the spiritual, vigorously striving for the mastery. For every victory over the love of pleasure (what is not otherwise always the case on the so-called path of virtue) brings at once its own reward in an increased vigor of the ideal life, and often in a broad spiritual progress in the wider sense. We can truthfully say that the most of the great advances in the inner life are ushered in by some renunciation which brings its own compensation. That to the love of pleasure all sorts of attractive names are given and that it in truth assumes now finer, now coarser, forms, should not lead us astray. It is, nevertheless, under all circumstances, that trait in us which most resembles animal nature and forthwith reveals its ignoble character in the fact that it is always united with egotism and the exploitation of others for our own selfish inclinations. The partial naïveté of the ancient world is wanting in humanity now, for their eyes have been opened to its meaning; and a universal failure to conquer the love of pleasure through higher interests would, in these days, be an unprecedented and quite impossible relapse of humanity into an earlier age.