These people who halted at nothing in order to elevate their weaknesses to the highest place among the virtues, and to monopolise goodness on earth—who called that good which was tame and soft and harmless, because they themselves could only survive in litters of cotton wool; who coloured the earth with the darkness that was in their own bodies; —who did not scruple to dub all manly and vital virtues odiously sinful and wicked, and who preferred to set the life of the whole world at stake, rather than acknowledge that it was precisely their own second-rate, third-rate, or even fourth-rate, vitality which was the greatest sin of all; who in one and the same breath preached their utilitarian "universal love" to the powerful, and then sent them to eternal damnation in another world: Nietzsche asks, are these people the supporters of a noble or of a slave morality?
The answer is obvious, and we need not labour the point. But it was so obvious to the lonely hermit, that the thought of it filled him with horror and dread, and he was moved to leave his cell and to descend into the plain, while there was yet time, with the object of urging us to transvalue our values.
In Christian values, Nietzsche read nihilism, decadence, degeneration, and death. They were calculated to favour the multiplication of the least desirable on earth: and, as such, despite his antecedents, and with his one desire, "the elevation of the type man," always before him, he condemned Christian morality from top to bottom. This magnificent attempt on the part of the low, the base, and the worthless, to establish themselves as the most powerful on earth, must be checked at all costs, and with terrible earnestness he exhorts us to alter our values.
"O my brethren, with whom lieth the greatest danger to the whole human future? Is it not with the good and the just?
"Break up, break up, I pray you, the good and the just!"
This condemnation of Christian values, as slave values—which Nietzsche regarded as his greatest service to mankind—he says he would write on all walls. He tells us he came just in the nick of time; to-morrow might be too late.
"It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.
"His soil is still rich enough for that purpose. But that soil will one day be too poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon."[10]
[1] G. E., p. 227