_Christian moral quackery._--Pity and contempt succeed each other at short intervals, and at the sight of them I feel as indignant as if I were in the presence of the most despicable crime. Here error is made a duty--a virtue, misapprehension has become a knack, the destructive instinct is systematised under the name of "redemption"; here every operation becomes a wound, an amputation of those very organs whose energy would be the prerequisite to a return of health. And in the best of cases no cure is effected; all that is done is to exchange one set of evil symptoms for another set.... And this pernicious nonsense, this systematised profanation and castration of life, passes for holy and sacred; to be in its service, to be an instrument of this art of healing--that is to say, to be a priest, is to be rendered distinguished, reverent, holy, and sacred. God alone could have been the Author of this supreme art of healing; redemption is only possible as a revelation, as an act of grace, as an unearned gift, made by the Creator Himself. Proposition I.: Spiritual healthiness is regarded as morbid, and creates suspicion.... Proposition II.: The prerequisites of a strong, exuberant life--strong desires and passions--are reckoned as objections against strong and exuberant life. Proposition III.: Everything which threatens danger to man, and which can overcome and ruin him, is evil--and should be torn root and branch from his soul. Proposition IV.: Man converted into a weak creature, inoffensive to himself and others, crushed by humility and modesty, and conscious of his weakness,--in fact, the "sinner,"--this is the desirable type, and one which one can _produce_ by means of a little spiritual surgery.... 249. What is it I protest against? That people should regard this paltry and peaceful mediocrity, this spiritual equilibrium which knows nothing of the fine impulses of great accumulations of strength, as something high, or possibly as the standard of all things. _Bacon of Verulam_ says: _Infimarum virtutum apud vulgus laus est, mediarum admiratio, supremarum sensus nullus._ Christianity as a religion, however, belongs to the _vulgus_: it has no feeling for the highest kind of _virtus_. 250. Let us see what the "genuine Christian" does of all the things which his instincts forbid him to do:--he covers beauty, pride, riches, self-reliance, brilliancy, knowledge, and power with suspicion and _mud_--in short, _all culture_: his object is to deprive the latter of its _clean conscience._ 251.