It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "German Reformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelical Protestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the Church's development the lofty and desperate Passion of this "saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those agitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved," those super-subtle, subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be _revenged_ on the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche laments were ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament." must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith of Christendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible Element in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this degrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized and eliminated. And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret" of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche--and they do not differ in essence, for all his Borgias!--will remain the sweet and deadly "fatalities" they have always been--for the few, the few, the few who understand them! For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with some of us an hour; with some of us a day--with a few of us a handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience. As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the face. Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning Nothingness. We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and receding--and we see the _new race_--in the hours of the "Great Noon-tide"--fulfilling its Prophet's hope--and we see _the end of that also!_ And seeing all this, because the air of our watch-tower is so ice-cold and keen, we neither tremble or blench. The world is deep, and deep is pain, and deeper than pain is joy. We have seen Creation, and have exulted in it. We have seen Destruction, and have exulted in it. We have watched the long, quivering Shadow of Life shudder across our glacial promontory, and we have watched that drowning tide receive it. It is enough. It is well. We have had our Vision. We know now what gives to the gods "that look" their faces wear. It now only remains for us to return to the familiar human Stage; to the "Gala-Night, within the lonesome latter years," and be gay, and "hard," and "superficial"!