Revolt against the ruling spiritual powers;
The attempt to make those virtues which facilitate the happiness of the lowly, a standard of all values—in fact, to call God that which is no more than the self-preservative instinct of that class of man possessed of least vitality;
Obedience and absolute abstention from war and resistance, justified by this ideal;
The love of one another as a result of the love of God.
The trick: The denial of all natural mobilia, and their transference to the spiritual world beyond ... the exploitation of virtue and its veneration for wholly interested motives, gradual denial of virtue in everything that is not Christian.
186.
The profound contempt with which the Christian was treated by the noble people of antiquity, is of the same order as the present instinctive aversion to Jews: it is the hatred which free and self-respecting classes feel towards those who wish to creep in secretly, and who combine an awkward bearing with foolish self-sufficiency.
The New Testament is the gospel of a completely ignoble species of man; its pretensions to highest values—yea, to all values, is, as a matter of fact, revolting—even nowadays.
187.
How little the subject matters! It is the spirit which gives the thing life! What a quantity of stuffy and sick-room air there is in all that chatter about "redemption," "love," "blessedness," "faith," "truth," "eternal life"! Let any one look into a really pagan book and compare the two; for instance, in Petronius, nothing at all is done, said, desired, and valued, which, according to a bigoted Christian estimate, is not sin, or even deadly sin. And yet how happy one feels with the purer air, the superior intellectuality, the quicker pace, and the free overflowing strength which is certain of the future! In the whole of the New Testament there is not one bouffonnerie: but that fact alone would suffice to refute any book....