the learned idiocy which nowadays tries to support such a notion cannot be too severely contradicted. At the time when the morbid and corrupted Chandala classes became Christianised in the whole of the _imperium,_ the very _contrary type,_ nobility, was extant in its finest and maturest forms. The greatest number became master; the democracy of Christian instincts triumphed.... Christianity was not “national,” it was not determined by race,—it appealed to all the disinherited forms of life, it had its allies everywhere. Christianity is built upon the rancour of the sick; its instinct is directed _against_ the sound, against health. Everything well-constituted, proud, high-spirited, and beautiful is offensive to its ears and eyes. Again I remind you of St Paul’s priceless words: “And God hath chosen the _weak_ things of the world, the _foolish_ things of the world; and _base_ things of the world, and things which are _despised”_: this was the formula, _in hoc signo_ decadence triumphed.—_God on the Cross_—does no one yet understand the terrible ulterior motive of this symbol?—Everything that suffers, everything that hangs on the cross, is _divine...._ All of us hang on the cross, consequently we are _divine ..._. We alone are divine.... Christianity was a victory; a _nobler_ type of character perished through it,—Christianity has been humanity’s greatest misfortune hitherto.—— 52 Christianity also stands opposed to everything happily constituted in the _mind,_—it can make use only of morbid reason as Christian reason; it takes the side of everything idiotic, it utters a curse upon “intellect,” upon the _superbia_ of the healthy intellect. Since illness belongs to the essence of Christianity, the typically Christian state, “faith,” _must_ also be a form of illness, and all straight, honest and scientific roads to knowledge must be repudiated by the Church as forbidden.... Doubt in itself is already a sin.... The total lack of psychological cleanliness in the priest, which reveals itself in his look, is a _result_ of decadence. Hysterical women, as also children with scrofulous constitutions, should be observed as a proof of how invariably instinctive falsity, the love of lying for the sake of lying, and the in ability either to look or to walk straight, are the expression of decadence. “Faith” simply means the refusal to know what is true. The pious person, the priest of both sexes, is false because he is ill: his instinct _demands_ that truth should not assert its right anywhere. “That which makes ill is good: that which proceeds from abundance, from superabundance and from power, is evil”: that is the view of the faithful. The _constraint to lie_—that is the sign by which I recognise every predetermined theologian.—Another characteristic of the theologian is his lack of _capacity_ for _philology._ What I mean here by the word philology is, in a general sense to be understood as the art of reading well, of being able to