No one is sufficiently aware of the barbarity of the notions among which we Europeans still live. To think that men have been able to believe that the "Salvation of the soul" depended upon a book!... And I am told that this is still believed. What is the good of all scientific education, all criticism and all hermeneutics, if such nonsense as the Church's interpretation of the Bible has not yet turned the colours of our bodies permanently into the red of shame? 243. _Subject for reflection_: To what extent does the fatal belief in "Divine Providence"--the most _paralysing_ belief for both the hand and the understanding that has ever existed--continue to prevail; to what extent have the Christian hypothesis and interpretation of Life continued their lives under the cover of terms like "Nature," "Progress," "perfectionment," "Darwinism," or beneath the superstition that there is a certain relation between happiness and virtue, unhappiness and sin? That absurd _belief_ in the course of things, in "Life" and in the "instinct of Life"; that foolish _resignation_ which arises from the notion that if only every one did his duty _all_ would go well--all this sort of thing can only have a meaning if one assumes that there is a direction of things _sub specie boni._ Even _fatalism,_ our present form of philosophical sensibility, is the result of a _long_ belief in Divine Providence, an unconscious result: as though it were nothing to do with us how everything goes! (As though we _might_ let things take their own course; the individual being only a _modus_ of the absolute reality.) 244.