f the
superior minority to subscribe to one of them publicly was already
sufficient to set him off as one in imminent need of psychiatrical
attention. Belief in them had become a mark of inferiority, like the
allied belief in madstones, magic and apparitions.

But though the theology of Christianity had thus sunk to the lowly
estate of a mere delusion of the rabble, propagated on that level by the
ancient caste of sacerdotal parasites, the ethics of Christianity
continued to enjoy the utmost acceptance, and perhaps even more
acceptance than ever before. It seemed to be generally felt, in fact,
that they simply _must_ be saved from the wreck--that the world would
vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting
them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose
what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult--a cult, to wit,
purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by
generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be
the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus. This cult still flourishes;
Protestantism tends to become identical with it; it invades Catholicism
as Modernism; it is supported by great numbers of men whose intelligence
is manifest and whose sincerity is not open to question. Even Nietzsche
himself yielded to it in weak moments, as you will discover on examining
his somewhat laborious effort to make Paul the villain of Christian
theology, and Jesus no more than an innocent bystander. But this
sentimental yielding never went far enough to distract his attention for
long from his main idea, which was this: that Christian ethics were
quite as dubious, at bottom, as Christian theology--that they were
founded, just as surely as such childish fables as the story of Jonah
and the whale, upon the peculiar prejudices and credulities, the special
desires and appetites, of inferior men--that they warred upon the best
interests of men of a better sort quite as unmistakably as the most
extravagant of objective superstitions. In brief, what he saw in
Christian ethics, under all the poetry and all the fine show of altruism
and all the theoretical benefits therein, was a democratic effort to
curb the egoism of the strong--a conspiracy of the _chandala_ against
the free functioning of their superiors, nay, against the free progress
of mankind. This theory is the thing he exposes in "The Antichrist,"
bringing to the business his amazingly c