The Christians have never led the life which Jesus commanded them to lead, and the impudent fable of the "justification by faith," and its unique and transcendental significance, is only the result of the Church's lack of courage and will in acknowledging those "works" which Jesus commanded.
The Buddhist behaves differently from the non-Buddhist; but the Christian behaves as all the rest of the world does, and possesses a Christianity of ceremonies and states of the soul.
The profound and contemptible falsehood of Christianity in Europe makes us deserve the contempt of the Arabs, Hindoos, and Chinese....
Let any one listen to the words of the first German statesman, concerning that which has preoccupied Europe for the last forty years.
192.
"Faith" or "works"?—But that the "works," the habit of particular works may engender a certain set of values or thoughts, is just as natural as it would be unnatural for "works" to proceed from mere valuations. Man must practise, not how to strengthen feelings of value, but how to strengthen action: first of all, one must be able to do something.... Luther's Christian Dilettantism. Faith is an asses' bridge. The background consists of a profound conviction on the part of Luther and his peers, that they are enabled to accomplish Christian "works," a personal fact, disguised under an extreme doubt as to whether all action is not sin and devil's work, so that the worth of life depends upon isolated and highly-strained conditions of inactivity (prayer, effusion, etc.).—Ultimately, Luther would be right: the instincts which are expressed by the whole bearing of the reformers are the most brutal that exist. Only in turning absolutely away from themselves, and in becoming absorbed in the opposite of themselves, only by means of an illusion ("faith") was existence endurable to them.
193.
"What was to be done in order to believe?"—an absurd question. That which is wrong with Christianity is, that it does none of the things that Christ commanded.
It is a mean life, but seen through the eye of contempt.
194.