_The pretence of youthfulness._--It is a mistake to imagine that, with Christianity, an ingenuous and youthful people rose against an old culture; the story goes that it was out of the lowest levels of society, where Christianity flourished and shot its roots, that the more profound source of life gushed forth afresh: but nothing can be understood of the psychology of Christianity, if it be supposed that it was the expression of revived youth among a people, or of the resuscitated strength of a race. It is rather a typical form of decadence, of moral-softening and of hysteria, amid a general hotch-potch of races and people that had lost all aims and had grown weary and sick. The wonderful company which gathered round this master-seducer of the populace, would not be at all out of place in a Russian novel: all the diseases of the nerves seem to give one another a rendezvous in this crowd--the absence of a known duty, the feeling that everything is nearing its end, that nothing is any longer worth while, and that contentment lies in _dolce far niente_. The power and certainty of the future in the Jew's instinct, its monstrous will for life and for power, lies in its ruling classes; the people who upheld primitive Christianity are best distinguished by this _exhausted condition_ of their instincts. On the one hand, they are sick of everything; on the other, they are content with each other, with themselves and for themselves. 181. Christianity regarded as _emancipated Judaism_ (just as a nobility which is both racial and indigenous ultimately emancipates itself from these conditions, and _goes in search of_ kindred elements....). (1) As a Church (community) on the territory of the State, as an unpolitical institution. (2) As life, breeding, practice, art of living. (3) As a _religion of sin_ (sin committed against _God, being the only recognised kind,_ and the only cause of all suffering), with a universal cure for it. There is no sin save against God; what is done against men, man shall not sit in judgment upon, nor call to account, except in the name of God. At the same time, all commandments (love): everything is associated with God, and all acts are performed according to God's will. Beneath this arrangement there lies exceptional intelligence (a very narrow life, such as that led by the Esquimaux, can only be endured by most peaceful and indulgent people: the Judæo-Christian dogma turns against sin in favour of the "sinner"). 182. The Jewish priesthood understood how to present everything it claimed to be right as a _divine precept,_ as an act of obedience to God, and also to introduce all those things which conduced to _preserve Israel_ and were the _conditions_ of its existence (for instance: the large number of "_works_": circumcision and the cult of sacrifices, as the very pivot of the national conscience), not as Nature, but as God.