what they try to turn
Nietzsche into--a rancorous, insensitive, bullying, materialistic
Heathen, making sport of "the Cross" and drinking Laager Beer.
Nietzsche loathed Laager Beer, and "the Cross" _burnt_ day and
night in his tormented, Dionysian soul.

It occurs to me sometimes that if there had been no "German
Reformation" and no overrunning of the world by vulgar evangelical
Protestantism, it would be still possible to bring into the circle of the
Church's development the lofty and desperate Passion of this
"saintly" Antichrist. After all, why should we concede that those
agitated, voluptuous, secret devices to get "saved," those super-subtle,
subliminal tricks of the weak and the perverted to be _revenged_
on the beautiful and the brave, which Nietzsche laments
were ever "bound up" in the same cover as the "Old Testament."
must remain forever the dominant "note" in the Faith of
Christendom? While the Successor of Caesar, while the Pontifex
Maximus of our "Spiritual Rome," still represents the Infallible
Element in the world's nobler religious Taste, there is yet, perhaps, a
remote chance that this vulgarizing of "the mountain summits" this
degrading of our Planet's Passion-Play, may be cauterized and
eliminated.

And yet it is not likely! Much more likely is it that the real "secret"
of Jesus, together with the real "secret" of Nietzsche--and they do
not differ in essence, for all his Borgias!--will remain the sweet and
deadly "fatalities" they have always been--for the few, the few, the
few who understand them!

For the final impression one carries away, after reading Nietzsche, is
the impression of "distinction," of remoteness from "vulgar
brutality," from "sensual baseness," from the clumsy compromises
of the world. It may not last, this Zarathustrian mood. It lasts with
some of us an hour; with some of us a day--with a few of us a
handful of years! But while it lasts, it is a rare and high experience.
As from an ice-bound promontory stretching out over the abysmal
gulfs, we dare to look Creation and Annihilation, for once, full in the
face.

Liberated from our own lusts, or using them, contemptuously and
indifferently, as engines of vision, we see the life and death of
worlds, the slow, long-drawn, moon-lit wave of Universe-drowning
Nothingness.

We see the races of men, falling, rising, stumbling, advancing and
receding--and we see the _new race_--in the hours of the "Great
Noon-tide"--fulfilling its