duplicity, insinuated themselves into the company of every individual, and proceeded to drain him of all seriousness for _real_ things, of all his instinct for _realities;_ this cowardly, effeminate and sugary gang have step by step alienated all “souls” from this colossal edifice,—those valuable, virile and noble natures who felt that the cause of Rome was their own personal cause, their own personal seriousness, their own personal _pride._ The stealth of the bigot, the secrecy of the conventicle, concepts as black as hell such as the sacrifice of the innocent, the _unto mystica_ in the drinking of blood, above all the slowly kindled fire of revenge, of Chandala revenge—such things became master of Rome, the same kind of religion on the pre-existent form of which Epicurus had waged war. One has only to read Lucretius in order to understand what Epicurus combated, _not_ Paganism, but “Christianity,” that is to say the corruption of souls through the concept of guilt, through the concept of punishment and immortality. He combated the _subterranean_ cults, the whole of latent Christianity—to deny immortality was at that time a genuine _deliverance._—And Epicurus had triumphed, every respectable thinker in the Roman Empire was an Epicurean: _then St Paul appeared_ ... St Paul, the Chandala hatred against Rome, against “the world,” the Jew, the eternal Jew _par excellence,_ become flesh and genius. ... What he divined was, how, by the help of the small sectarian Christian movement, independent of Judaism, a universal conflagration could be kindled; how, with the symbol of the “God on the Cross,” everything submerged, everything secretly insurrectionary, the whole offspring of anarchical intrigues could be gathered together to constitute an enormous power. “For salvation is of the Jews.”—Christianity is the formula for the supersession, _and_ epitomising of all kinds of subterranean cults, that of Osiris, of the Great Mother, of Mithras for example: St Paul’s genius consisted in his discovery of this. In this matter his instinct was so certain, that, regardless of doing violence to truth, he laid the ideas by means of which those Chandala religions fascinated, upon the very lips of the “Saviour” he had invented, and not only upon his lips,—that he _made_ out of him something which even a Mithras priest could understand.... This was his moment of Damascus: he saw that he had _need of_ the belief in immortality in order to depreciate “the world,” that the notion of “hell” would become master of Rome, that with a “Beyond” _this life_ can be killed. ... Nihilist and Christian,—they rhyme in German, and they do not only rhyme. 59