suffering type of man), the hitherto Paramount religions—­to give a general appreciation of them—­are among the principal causes which have kept the type of “man” upon a lower level—­they have preserved too much that which should have perished. One has to thank them for invaluable services; and who is sufficiently rich in gratitude not to feel poor at the contemplation of all that the “spiritual men” of Christianity have done for Europe hitherto!  But when they had given comfort to the sufferers, courage to the oppressed and despairing, a staff and support to the helpless, and when they had allured from society into convents and spiritual penitentiaries the broken-hearted and distracted:  what else had they to do in order to work systematically in that fashion, and with a good conscience, for the preservation of all the sick and suffering, which means, in deed and in truth, to work for the deterioration of the European race?  To reverse all estimates of value—­that is what they had to do!  And to shatter the strong, to spoil great hopes, to cast suspicion on the delight in beauty, to break down everything autonomous, manly, conquering, and imperious—­all instincts which are natural to the highest and most successful type of “man”—­ into uncertainty, distress of conscience, and self-destruction; forsooth, to invert all love of the earthly and of supremacy over the earth, into hatred of the earth and earthly things—­that is the task the Church imposed on itself, and was obliged to impose, until, according to its standard of value, “unworldliness,” “unsensuousness,” and “higher man” fused into one sentiment.  If one could observe the strangely painful, equally coarse and refined comedy of European Christianity with the derisive and impartial eye of an Epicurean god, I should think one would never cease marvelling and laughing; does it not actually seem that some single will has ruled over Europe for eighteen centuries in order to make a sublime abortion of man?  He, however, who, with opposite requirements (no longer Epicurean) and with some divine hammer in his hand, could approach this almost voluntary degeneration and stunting of mankind, as exemplified in the European Christian (Pascal, for instance), would he not have to cry aloud with rage, pity, and horror:  “Oh, you bunglers, presumptuous pitiful bunglers, what have you done!  Was that a work for your hands?  How you have hacked and botched my finest stone!  What have you presumed to do!”—­I should say that Christianity has hitherto been the most portentous of presumptions.  Men, not great enough, nor hard enough, to be entitled as artists to take part in fashioning man; men, not sufficiently strong and far-sighted to allow, with sublime self-constraint, the obvious law of the thousandfold failures and perishings to prevail; men, not sufficiently noble to see the radically different grades of rank and intervals of rank that separate man from man:—­Such men, with their “equality before God,” have hitherto swayed the destiny of Europe; until at last a dwarfed, almost ludicrous species has been produced, a gregarious animal, something obliging, sickly, mediocre, the European of the present day.