ke
against them. He was not blind to their faults, but when he set them
beside Christians he could not deny their general superiority. Perhaps
in America and England, as on the Continent, the increasing Jewishness
of the plutocracy, while cutting it off from all chance of ever
developing into an aristocracy, will yet lift it to such a dignity that
it will at least deserve a certain grudging respect.

But even so, it will remain in a sort of half-world, midway between the
gutter and the stars. Above it will still stand the small group of men
that constitutes the permanent aristocracy of the race--the men of
imagination and high purpose, the makers of genuine progress, the brave
and ardent spirits, above all petty fears and discontents and above all
petty hopes and ideals no less. There were heroes before Agamemnon;
there will be Bachs after Johann Sebastian. And beneath the Judaized
plutocracy, the sublimated _bourgeoisie_, there the immemorial
proletariat, I venture to guess, will roar on, endlessly tortured by its
vain hatreds and envies, stampeded and made to tremble by its ancient
superstitions, prodded and made miserable by its sordid and degrading
hopes. It seems to me very likely that, in this proletariat,
Christianity will continue to survive. It is nonsense, true enough, but
it is sweet. Nietzsche, denouncing its dangers as a poison, almost falls
into the error of denying it its undoubtedly sugary smack. Of all the
religions ever devised by the great practical jokers of the race, this
is the one that offers most for the least money, so to speak, to the
inferior man. It starts out by denying his inferiority in plain terms:
_all_ men are equal in the sight of God. It ends by erecting that
inferiority into a sort of actual superiority: it is a merit to be
stupid, and miserable, and sorely put upon--of such are the celestial
elect. Not all the eloquence of a million Nietzsches, nor all the
painful marshalling of evidence of a million Darwins and Harnacks, will
ever empty that great consolation of its allure. The most they can ever
accomplish is to make the superior orders of men acutely conscious of
the exact nature of it, and so give them armament against the contagion.
This is going on; this is being done. I think that "The Antichrist" has
a useful place in that enterprise. It is strident, it is often
extravagant, it is, to many sensitive men, in the worst of possible
taste, but at bottom it is enormously apt and