reality. And so it may be said of him that he frees himself of original sin, that in him God becomes man, bnt also that the man becomes God; in him was all error and all guilt; in him there comes to be all expiation and redemption.
Thus the founder of a religion is the greatest of the geniuses, for he has vanquished the most. He is the man who has accomplished victoriously what the deepest thinkers of mankind have thought of only timorously as a possibility, the complete regeneration of a man the reversal of his will. Other great men of genius have, indeed, to fight against evil, but the bent of their souls is towards the good. The founder of a religion has so much in him of evil, of the perverse, of earthly passion, that he must fight with the enemy within him for forty days in the wilderness, without food or sleep. It was only thus that he can conquer and overcome the death within him and free himself for the highest life. Were it otherwise there would be no impulse to found a faith. The founder of a religion is thus the very antipodes of the emperor; emperor and Galilean are at the two poles of thought. In Napoleon s life, also, there was a moment when a conversion took place; but this was not a turning away from earthly life, but the deliberate decision for the treasure and power and splendour of the earthly life. Napoleon was great in he colossal intensity with which he flung from him all the ideal, all relation to the absolute, in the magnitude of his guilt The founder of religion, on the other hand, cannot and will not bring to man anything except that which was most difficult for himself to attain, the reconciliation with God He knows that he himself was the man most laden with guilt, and he atones for the guilt by his death on the cross.
There were two possibilities in Judaism. Before the birth of Christ, these two, negation and affirmation, were together awaiting choice. Christ was the man who conquered in Himself Judaism, the greatest negation, and created Christianity, the strongest affirmation and the most
