WHAT IS RELIGION? 321
man appears who announces his discovery that self- renunciation, mildness, meekness, love— that all these are vices, which are ruining humanity (he refers to Christianity, forgetting all the other religions). It is comprehensible that such an assertion should, at first, perplex peojde. But, after thinking a little and failing to find in his writings any proofs supporting this vague assertion, every rational man ought to reject such books, and only be surprised that nowadays there is no nonsense too arrant to find a publisher. With the works of Nietzsche that course has not been adopted. The majority of pseudo-enlightened people seriously discuss the theory of ' Superhumanity,' and acclaim its author as a great philosopher : a succe:?sor to Descartes, Leibnitz and Kant.
And all this has happened because the majority of pseudo-enlightened men of to-day dislike anything re- minding them of virtue, or of its chief basis : self- renunciation and love — things that restrain and con- demn the animal life they lead ; and they gladly wel- come a doctrine of egotism and cruelty — however poorly, unintelligibly and disjointedly expressed — which justifies the system of founding one's own happi- ness and greatness upon the lives of others : the system in which they live.
Christ reproached the scribes and Pharisees, because they took the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven, but neither themselves entered in nor let others enter.
The learned scribes of to-day do the same : they have now taken the keys, not of the Kingdom of Heaven but of enlightenment, and neither enter in nor let others enter.
The hierophants, the priests, by all sorts of decep- tion and hypnotism, have instilled into people an idea that Christianity is not a teaching proclaiming the equality of all men, and therefore destructive of the whole present system of life ; but that, on the contrary.
