The reality on which Christianity was able to build up its power consisted of the small dispersed _Jewish families,_ with their warmth, tenderness, and peculiar readiness to help, which, to the whole of the Roman Empire, was perhaps the most incomprehensible and least familiar of their characteristics; they were also united by their pride at being a "chosen people," concealed beneath a cloak of humility, and by their secret denial of all that was uppermost and that possessed power and splendour, although there was no shade of envy in their denial. _To have recognised this as a power,_ to have regarded this _blessed_ state as communicable, seductive, and infectious even where pagans were concerned--this constituted Paul's genius: to use up the treasure of latent energy and cautious happiness for the purposes of "a Jewish Church of free confession," and to avail himself of all the Jewish experience, their propaganda, and their expertness in _the preservation of a community_ under a foreign power--this is what he conceived to be his duty. He it was who discovered that absolutely unpolitical and isolated body of _paltry people,_ and their art of asserting themselves and pushing themselves to the front, by means of a host of acquired virtues which are made to represent the only forms of virtue ("the self-preservative measure and weapon of success of a certain class of man"). The principle of _love_ comes from the small community of Jewish people: a _very passionate_ soul glows here, beneath the ashes of humility and wretchedness: it is neither Greek, Indian, nor German. The song in praise of love which Paul wrote is not Christian; it is the Jewish flare of that eternal flame which is Semitic. If Christianity has done anything essentially new in a psychological sense, it is this, that it has _increased the temperature of the soul_ among those cooler and more noble races who were at one time at the head of affairs; it discovered that the most wretched life could be made rich and invaluable, by means of an elevation of the temperature of the soul.... It is easily understood that a transfer of this sort could _not_ take place among the ruling classes: the Jews and Christians were at a disadvantage owing to their bad manners--spiritual strength and passion, when accompanied by bad manners, only provoke loathing (I become aware of these bad manners while reading the New Testament). It was necessary to be related both in baseness and sorrow with this type of lower manhood in order to feel anything attractive in him.... The attitude a man maintains towards the New Testament is a test of the amount of taste he may have for the classics (see Tacitus); he who is not revolted by it, he who does not feel honestly and deeply that he is in the presence of a sort of _fœda superstitio_ when reading it, and who does not draw his hand back so as not to soil his fingers--such a man does not know what is classical. A man must feel about "the cross" as Goethe did.[1]