First recipe: One appropriates virtue in general, and makes it the main feature of one's ideal; the older ideal is denied and declared to be _the reverse of all ideals._ Slander has to be carried to a fine art for this purpose. Second recipe: A type of man is set up as a general _standard_; and this is projected into all things, behind all things, and behind the destiny of all things--as God. Third recipe: The opponents of one's ideal are declared to be the opponents of God; one arrogates to oneself a _right_ to great pathos, to power, and a right to curse and to bless. Fourth recipe: All suffering, all gruesome, terrible, and fatal things are declared to be the results of opposition to _ones_ ideal--all suffering is _punishment_ even in the case of one's adherents (except it be a trial, etc.). Fifth recipe: One goes so far as to regard Nature as the reverse of one's ideal, and the lengthy sojourn amid natural conditions is considered a great trial of patience--a sort of martyrdom; one studies contempt, both in one's attitudes and one's looks towards all "natural things." Sixth recipe: The triumph of anti-naturalism and ideal castration, the triumph of the world of the pure, good, sinless, and blessed, is projected into the future as the consummation, the finale, the great hope, and the "Coming of the Kingdom of God." I hope that one may still be allowed to _laugh_ at this artificial hoisting up of a small species of man to the position of an absolute standard of all things? 205. What I do not at all like in Jesus of Nazareth and His Apostle Paul, is that they _stuffed so much into the heads of paltry people,_ as if their modest virtues were worth so much ado. We have had to pay dearly for it all; for they brought the most valuable qualities of both virtue and man into ill repute; they set the guilty conscience and the self-respect of noble souls at loggerheads, and they led the _braver, more magnanimous, more daring, and more excessive_ tendencies of strong souls astray--even to self-destruction. 206. In the New Testament, and especially in the Gospels, I discern absolutely no sign of a "_Divine_" voice: but rather an _indirect form_ of the most subterranean fury, both in slander and destructiveness--one of the most dishonest forms of hatred. It lacks _all_ knowledge of the qualities of a _higher nature._ It makes an impudent abuse of all kinds of plausibilities, and the whole stock of proverbs is used up and foisted upon one in its pages. Was it necessary to make a _God_ come in order to appeal to those publicans and to say to them, etc. etc.? Nothing could be more vulgar than this struggle with the _Pharisees,_ carried on with a host of absurd and unpractical moral pretences; the mob, of course, has always been entertained by such feats. Fancy the reproach of "hypocrisy!" coming from those lips! Nothing could be more vulgar than this treatment of one's opponents--a most insidious sign of nobility or its _reverse...._ 207.