123.
Church Disestablishment.—There is not enough religion in the world even to destroy religions.
124.
The Sinlessness of Man.—If it is understood how "sin came into the world," namely through errors of reason by which men held each other, even the single individual held himself, to be much blacker and much worse than was actually the case, the whole sensation will be much lightened, and man and the world will appear in a blaze of innocence which it will do one good to contemplate. In the midst of nature man is always the child per se. This child sometimes has a heavy and terrifying dream, but when it opens its eyes it always finds itself back again in Paradise.
125.
The Irreligiousness of Artists.—Homer is so much at home amongst his gods, and is so familiar with them as a poet, that he must have been deeply irreligious; that which the popular faith gave him—a meagre, rude, partly terrible superstition—he treated as freely as the sculptor does his clay, with the same unconcern, therefore, which Æschylus and Aristophanes possessed, and by which in later times the great artists of the Renaissance distinguished themselves, as also did Shakespeare and Goethe.
126.
The Art and Power of False Interpretations.—All the visions, terrors, torpors, and ecstasies of saints are well-known forms of disease, which are only, by reason of deep-rooted religious and psychological errors, differently explained by him, namely not as diseases. Thus, perhaps, the Daimonion of Socrates was only an affection of the ear, which he, in accordance with his ruling moral mode of thought, expounded differently from what would be the case now. It is the same thing with the madness and ravings of the prophets and soothsayers; it is always the degree of knowledge, fantasy, effort, morality in the head and heart of the interpreters which has made so much of it. For the greatest achievements of the people who are called geniuses and saints it is necessary that they should secure interpreters by force, who misunderstand them for the good of mankind.
127.