effective--and on the
surface it is undoubtedly a good show. One somehow enjoys, with the
malice that is native to man, the spectacle of anathemas batted back; it
is refreshing to see the pitchfork employed against gentlemen who have
doomed such innumerable caravans to hell. In Nietzsche they found, after
many long years, a foeman worthy of them--not a mere fancy swordsman
like Voltaire, or a mob orator like Tom Paine, or a pedant like the
heretics of exegesis, but a gladiator armed with steel and armoured with
steel, and showing all the ferocious gusto of a mediaeval bishop. It is
a pity that Holy Church has no process for the elevation of demons, like
its process for the canonization of saints. There must be a long roll of
black miracles to the discredit of the Accursed Friedrich--sinners
purged of conscience and made happy in their sinning, clerics shaken in
their theology by visions of a new and better holy city, the strong made
to exult, the weak robbed of their old sad romance. It would be a
pleasure to see the _Advocatus Diaboli_ turn from the table of the
prosecution to the table of the defence, and move in solemn form for the
damnation of the Naumburg hobgoblin....

Of all Nietzsche's books, "The Antichrist" comes nearest to
conventionality in form. It presents a connected argument with very few
interludes, and has a beginning, a middle and an end. Most of his works
are in the form of collections of apothegms, and sometimes the subject
changes on every second page. This fact constitutes one of the counts in
the orthodox indictment of him: it is cited as proof that his capacity
for consecutive thought was limited, and that he was thus deficient
mentally, and perhaps a downright moron. The argument, it must be
obvious, is fundamentally nonsensical. What deceives the professors is
the traditional prolixity of philosophers. Because the average
philosophical writer, when he essays to expose his ideas, makes such
inordinate drafts upon the parts of speech that the dictionary is almost
emptied these defective observers jump to the conclusion that his
intrinsic notions are of corresponding weight. This is not unseldom
quite untrue. What makes philosophy so garrulous is not the profundity
of philosophers, but their lack of art; they are like physicians who
sought to cure a slight hyperacidity by giving the patient a carload of
burned oyster-shells to eat. There is, too, the endless poll-parrotting
that goes on: each new