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The ascetic priest has, wherever he has obtained the mastery, corrupted the health of the soul, he has consequently also corrupted taste in artibus et litteris ⁠—he corrupts it still. “Consequently?” I hope I shall be granted this “consequently”; at any rate, I am not going to prove it first. One solitary indication, it concerns the arch-book of Christian literature, their real model, their “book-in-itself.” In the very midst of the Graeco-Roman splendour, which was also a splendour of books, face to face with an ancient world of writings which had not yet fallen into decay and ruin, at a time when certain books were still to be read, to possess which we would give nowadays half our literature in exchange, at that time the simplicity and vanity of Christian agitators (they are generally called Fathers of the Church) dared to declare: “We too have our classical literature, we do not need that of the Greeks ”⁠—and meanwhile they proudly pointed to their books of legends, their letters of apostles, and their apologetic tractlets, just in the same way that today the English “Salvation Army” wages its fight against Shakespeare and other “heathens” with an analogous literature. You already guess it, I do not like the “New Testament”; it almost upsets me that I stand so isolated in my taste so far as concerns this valued, this overvalued Scripture; the taste of two thousand years is against me; but what boots it! “Here I stand! I cannot help myself” ⁠—I have the courage of my bad taste. The Old Testament⁠—yes, that is something quite different, all honour to the Old Testament! I find therein great men, an heroic landscape, and one of the rarest phenomena in the world, the incomparable naivete of the strong heart ; further still, I find a people. In the New, on the contrary, just a hostel of petty sects, pure rococo of the soul, twisting angles and fancy touches, nothing but conventicle air, not to forget an occasional whiff of bucolic sweetness which appertains to the epoch ( and the Roman province) and is less Jewish than Hellenistic. Meekness and braggadocio