"I understand, I prick my ears up again (ah! ah! ah! and I hold my nose). Now do I hear for the first time that which they have said so often: 'We good, _we are the righteous_'--what they demand they call not revenge but 'the triumph of _righteousness_'; what they hate is not their enemy, no, they hate 'unrighteousness,' 'godlessness'; what they believe in and hope is not the hope of revenge, the intoxication of sweet revenge (--"sweeter than honey," did Homer call it?), but the victory of God, of the _righteous_ _God_ over the 'godless'; what is left for them to love in this world is not _their_ brothers in hate, but their 'brothers in love,' as they say, all the good and righteous on the earth." And how do they name that which serves them as a solace against all the troubles of life--their phantasmagoria of their anticipated future blessedness? "How? Do I hear right? They call it 'the last judgment,' the advent of their kingdom, 'the kingdom of God'--but _in the meanwhile_ they live 'in faith,' 'in love,' 'in hope.'" Enough! Enough! 15. In the faith in what? In the love for what? In the hope of what? These weaklings!--they also, forsooth, wish to be the strong some time; there is no doubt about it, some time _their_ kingdom also must come--"the kingdom of God" is their name for it, as has been mentioned: they are so meek in everything! Yet in order to experience _that_ kingdom it is necessary to live long, to live beyond death,--yes, _eternal_ life is necessary so that one can make up for ever for that earthly life "in faith," "in love," "in hope." Make up for what? Make up by what? Dante, as it seems to me, made a crass mistake when with awe-inspiring ingenuity he placed that inscription over the gate of his hell, "Me too made eternal love": at any rate the following inscription would have a much better right to stand over the gate of the Christian Paradise and its "eternal blessedness"--"Me too made eternal hate"--granted of course that a truth may rightly stand over the gate to a lie! For what is the blessedness of that Paradise? Possibly we could quickly surmise it; but it is better that it should be explicitly attested by an authority who in such matters is not to be disparaged, Thomas of Aquinas, the great teacher and saint. "_Beati in regno celesti_" says he, as gently as a lamb, "_videbunt pœnas damnatorum, ut beatitudo illis magis complaceat_." Or if we wish to hear a stronger tone, a word from the mouth of a triumphant father of the Church, who warned his disciples against the cruel ecstasies of the public spectacles--But why? Faith offers us much more,--says he, _de Spectac._, c. 29 ss.,--something much stronger; thanks to the redemption, joys of quite another kind stand at our disposal; instead of athletes we have our martyrs; we wish for blood, well, we have the blood of Christ--but what then awaits us on the day of his return, of his triumph. And then does he proceed, does this enraptured visionary: "_at enim