When the centre of gravity of life is laid, _not_ in life, but in a beyond--in _nonentity,_ life is utterly robbed of its balance. The great lie of personal immortality destroys all reason, all nature in the instincts,--everything in the instincts that is beneficent, that promotes life and that is a guarantee of the future, henceforward aroused suspicion. The very meaning of life is now construed as the effort to live in such a way that life no longer has any point.... Why show any public spirit? Why be grateful for one's origin and one's forebears? Why collaborate with one's fellows, and be confident? Why be concerned about the general weal or strive after it?... All these things are merely so many "temptations," so many deviations from the "straight path." "One thing only is necessary" ... that everybody, as an "immortal soul," should have equal rank, that in the totality of beings, the "salvation" of each individual may lay claim to eternal importance, that insignificant bigots and three-quarter-lunatics may have the right to suppose that the laws of nature may be persistently _broken_ on their account,--any such magnification of every kind of selfishness to infinity, to _insolence,_ cannot be branded with sufficient contempt. And yet it is to this miserable flattery of personal vanity that Christianity owed its _triumph,--_by this means it lured all the bungled and the botched, all revolting and revolted people, all abortions, the whole of the refuse and offal of humanity, over to its side. 185-186 With Christianity, the art of feeling holy lies, which constitutes the whole of Judaism, reaches its final mastership, thanks to many centuries of Jewish and most thoroughly serious training and practice. 188 Only read the gospels as books calculated to seduce by means of morality--morality is appropriated by these petty people,--they know what morality can do! The best way of leading mankind by the nose is with morality! The fact is that the most conscious _conceit_ of people who believe themselves to be _chosen,_ here simulates modesty: in this way they, the Christian community, the "good and the just" place themselves once and for all on a certain side, the side "of Truth"--and the rest of mankind, "the world" on the other.... This was the most fatal kind of megalomania that had ever yet existed on earth; insignificant little abortions of bigots and liars began to lay sole claim to the concepts "God," "Truth," "Light," "Spirit," "Love," "Wisdom," "Life," as if these things were, so to speak, synonyms of themselves, in order to fence themselves off from "the world"; little ultra-Jews, ripe for every kind of madhouse, twisted values round in order to suit themselves, just as if the Christian, alone, were the meaning, the salt, the standard and even the _"ultimate tribunal"_ of all the rest of mankind. 189-190