He understood the _great needs of the pagan worlds_ and he gave quite an absolutely arbitrary picture of those two plain facts, Christ's life and death. He gave the whole a new accent, altering the equilibrium everywhere ... he was one of the most active destroyers of primitive Christianity. The attempt made on the life of _priests and theologians_ culminated, thanks to Paul, in a new priesthood and theology--a _ruling_ caste and a _Church._ The attempt made to suppress the fussy importance of the "person," culminated in the belief in the eternal "personality" (and in the anxiety concerning "eternal salvation" ...), and in the most paradoxical exaggeration of individual egoism. This is the humorous side of the question--tragic humour: Paul again set up on a large scale precisely what Jesus had overthrown by His life. At last, when the Church edifice was complete, it even sanctioned the _existence_ of the _State._ 168. The Church is precisely that against which Jesus inveighed--and against which He taught His disciples to fight. 169. A God who died for our sins, salvation through faith, resurrection after death--all these things are the counterfeit coins of real Christianity, for which that pernicious blockhead Paul must be held responsible. The _life which must serve as an example_ consists in love and humility; in the abundance of hearty emotion which does not even exclude the lowliest; in the formal renunciation of all desire of making its rights felt; in conquest, in the sense of triumph over oneself; in the belief in salvation in this world, despite all sorrow, opposition, and death; in forgiveness and the absence of anger and contempt; in the absence of a desire to be rewarded; in the refusal to be bound to anybody; abandonment to all that is most spiritual and intellectual;--in fact, a very proud life controlled by the will of a servile and poor life. Once the Church had allowed itself to take over _all the Christian practice,_ and had formally sanctioned the State,--that kind of life which Jesus combats and condemns,--it was obliged to lay the sense of Christianity in other things than early Christian ideals--that is to say, in the _faith_ in incredible things, in the ceremonial of prayers, worship, feasts, etc. etc. The notions "sin," "forgiveness," "punishment," "reward"--everything, in fact, which had nothing in common with, and was quite _absent_ from, primitive Christianity, now comes into the foreground. An appalling stew of Greek philosophy and Judaism; asceticism; continual judgments and condemnations; the order of rank, etc. 170. Christianity has, from the first, always transformed the symbolical into crude realities: (1) The antitheses "true life" and "false life" were misunderstood and changed into "life here" and "life beyond." (2) The notion "eternal life," as opposed to the personal life which is ephemeral, is translated into "personal immortality";