Long before Nietzsche had reached his prime David Strauss had published his _Life of Jesus_; in 1863, when Nietzsche was still in his teens, Renan published his _Vie de Jésus_, and in the meantime Charles Darwin had given his _Origin of Species_ to the world. These books had been read by a Europe that had already studied Hume and Lamarck, Kant and Schopenhauer, and in all directions a fine ear could not help hearing the falling timbers of Christian dogma. In the midst of this general work of destruction it was almost impossible for Nietzsche to remain unmoved or indifferent, and very soon he found that he too was drawn into the general stream of European thought; but only to prove how completely he was independent of it, and in every way superior to it. He contemplated the work of the destroyers for some time with amused interest; and then it suddenly occurred to him to inquire whether these zealous and well-meaning housebreakers were really doing any lasting good, or whether all their efforts were not perhaps a little misguided. True, they were pulling the embellishments from the walls and were casting the most cherished idols of the Christian Faith into the dust. But the walls themselves, the actual design of the edifice, remained untouched and as strong as ever. A few broken stones, a few complaints from the priestly archæologists who wished to preserve them, and then all the noise subsided! Europe remained as it was before --that is to say, still in possession of a stronghold of Christianity, merely divested of its superfluous ornament. Nietzsche soon perceived that, in spite of all the rubbish and refuse which such people as Kant, Schopenhauer, Strauss, Renan and others had made of Christian dogma, the essential core of Christianity, the vital organ of its body--its morality--had so far remained absolutely intact. Nay, he saw that it was actually being plastered up and restored by scholars and men of science who vowed that they could proffer reasonable, rationalistic, and logical grounds in support of it. Just as Christian dogma and metaphysics had been rationalised and philosophically proved by the scholars of the Middle Ages, and even as late as Leibnitz; so, now, Christian morality was being presented in a purely philosophical garb by the intellects of Europe. Having relinquished the dogma as no longer tenable, all scholars and men of science were trying with redoubled vigour to bolster up Christian ethics with elaborate text-books and learned treatises. There were some who accepted it all as if it were innate in human nature, and attributed it to a "moral sense"; there were others--good-natured biologists--who were likewise desirous of leaving it whole, and who declared with conviction that it was the natural outcome of the feelings of pleasure and pain; and there were yet others who assumed that it must have been evolved quite automatically out of expediency and non-expediency.