ld be no call for anathemas from the sacred desk. But these
onslaughts, in point of fact, have behind them a tremendous learning and
a great deal of point and plausibility--there are, in brief, bullets in
the gun, teeth in the tiger,--and so it is no wonder that they excite
the ire of men who hold, as a primary article of belief, that their
acceptance would destroy civilization, darken the sun, and bring Jahveh
to sobs upon His Throne.

But in all this justifiable fear, of course, there remains a false
assumption, and that is the assumption that Nietzsche proposed to
destroy Christianity altogether, and so rob the plain people of the
world of their virtue, their spiritual consolations, and their hope of
heaven. Nothing could be more untrue. The fact is that Nietzsche had no
interest whatever in the delusions of the plain people--that is,
intrinsically. It seemed to him of small moment _what_ they believed, so
long as it was safely imbecile. What he stood against was not their
beliefs, but the elevation of those beliefs, by any sort of democratic
process, to the dignity of a state philosophy--what he feared most was
the pollution and crippling of the superior minority by intellectual
disease from below. His plain aim in "The Antichrist" was to combat that
menace by completing the work begun, on the one hand, by Darwin and the
other evolutionist philosophers, and, on the other hand, by German
historians and philologians. The net effect of this earlier attack, in
the eighties, had been the collapse of Christian theology as a serious
concern of educated men. The mob, it must be obvious, was very little
shaken; even to this day it has not put off its belief in the essential
Christian doctrines. But the _intelligentsia_, by 1885, had been pretty
well convinced. No man of sound information, at the time Nietzsche
planned "The Antichrist," actually believed that the world was created
in seven days, or that its fauna was once overwhelmed by a flood as a
penalty for the sins of man, or that Noah saved the boa constrictor, the
prairie dog and the _pediculus capitis_ by taking a pair of each into
the ark, or that Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt, or that a
fragment of the True Cross could cure hydrophobia. Such notions, still
almost universally prevalent in Christendom a century before, were now
confined to the great body of ignorant and credulous men--that is, to
ninety-five or ninety-six percent. of the race. For a man o