The “Kingdom of Heaven” is a state of the heart—not something which exists “beyond this earth” or comes to you “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is lacking in the gospels. Death is not a bridge, not a means of access: it is absent because it belongs to quite a different and merely apparent world the only use of which is to furnish signs, similes. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea—the “hour,” time in general, physical life and its crises do not exist for the messenger of “glad tidings.” ... The “Kingdom of God” is not some thing that is expected; it has no yesterday nor any day after to-morrow, it is not going to come in a “thousand years”—it is an experience of a human heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere.... 35 This “messenger of glad tidings” died as he lived and as he taught—_not_ in order “to save mankind,” but in order to show how one ought to live. It was a mode of life that he bequeathed to mankind: his behaviour before his judges, his attitude towards his executioners, his accusers, and all kinds of calumny and scorn,—his demeanour on the _cross._ He offers no resistance; he does not defend his rights; he takes no step to ward off the most extreme consequences, he does more,—he provokes them. And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who treat him ill.... _Not_ to defend one’s self, _not_ to show anger, not to hold anyone responsible.... But to refrain from resisting even the evil one,—to _love_ him.... 36 —Only we spirits that have _become free,_ possess the necessary condition for understanding something which nineteen centuries have misunderstood,—that honesty which has become an instinct and a passion in us, and which wages war upon the “holy lie” with even more vigour than upon every other lie.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our beneficent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the mind, which, alone, renders the solution of such strange and subtle things possible: at all times, with shameless egoism, all that people sought was their _own_ advantage in these matters, the Church was built up out of contradiction to the gospel.... Whoever might seek for signs pointing to the guiding fingers of an ironical deity behind the great comedy of existence, would find no small argument in the _huge note of interrogation_ that is called Christianity. The fact that mankind is on its knees before the reverse of that which formed the origin, the meaning and the _rights_ of the gospel; the fact that, in the idea “Church,” precisely that is pronounced holy which the “messenger of glad tidings” regarded as _beneath_ him, as _behind_ him—one might seek in vain for a more egregious example _of world-historic_ irony—- 37