The conservative tendency of Christianity does not permit thinking of death otherwise than with the purpose to take its sting from it and—live on and preserve oneself nicely. The Christian lets everything happen and come upon him if he—the arch-Jew—can only haggle and smuggle himself into heaven; he must not kill himself, he must only—preserve himself and work at the "preparation of a future abode." Conservatism or "conquest of death" lies at his heart; "the last enemy that is abolished is death."[214] "Christ has taken the power from death and brought life and imperishable being to light by the gospel."[215] "Imperishableness," stability.
The moral man wants the good, the right; and, if he takes to the means that lead to this goal, really lead to it, then these means are not his means, but those of the good, right, etc., itself. These means are never immoral, because the good end itself mediates itself through them: the end sanctifies the means. They call this maxim jesuitical, but it is "moral" through and through. The moral man acts in the service of an end or an idea: he makes himself the tool of the idea of the good, as the pious man counts it his glory to be a tool or instrument of God. To await death is what the moral commandment postulates as the good; to give it to oneself is immoral and bad: suicide finds no excuse before the judgment-seat of morality. If the religious man forbids it because "you have not given yourself life, but God, who alone can also take it from you again" (as if, even talking in this conception, God did not take it from me just as much when I kill myself as when a tile from the roof, or a hostile bullet, fells me; for he would have aroused the resolution of death in me too!), the moral man forbids it because I owe my life to the fatherland, etc., "because I do not know whether I may not yet accomplish good by my life." Of course, for in me good loses a tool, as God does an instrument. If I am immoral, the good is served in my amendment; if I am "ungodly," God has joy in my penitence. Suicide, therefore, is ungodly as well as nefarious. If one whose standpoint is religiousness takes his own life, he acts in forgetfulness of God; but, if the suicide's standpoint is morality, he acts in forgetfulness of duty, immorally. People worried themselves much with the question whether Emilia Galotti's death can be justified before morality (they take it as if it were suicide, which it is too in substance). That she is so infatuated with chastity, this moral good, as to yield up even her life for it is certainly moral; but, again, that she fears the weakness of her flesh is immoral.[216] Such contradictions form the tragic conflict universally in the moral drama; and one must think and feel morally to be able to take an interest in it.
What holds good of piety and morality will necessarily apply to humanity also, because one owes his life likewise to man, mankind or the species. Only when I am under obligation to no being is the maintaining of life—my affair. "A leap from this bridge makes me free!"
But, if we owe the maintaining of our life to that being that we are to make alive in ourselves, it is not less our duty not to lead this life according to our pleasure, but to shape it in conformity to that being. All my feeling, thinking, and willing, all my doing and designing, belongs to—him.
What is in conformity to that being is to be inferred from his concept; and how differently has this concept been conceived! or how differently has that being been imagined! What demands the Supreme Being makes on the Mohammedan; what different ones the Christian, again, thinks he hears from him; how divergent, therefore, must the shaping of the lives of the two turn out! Only this do all hold fast, that the Supreme Being is to judge[217] our life.
But the pious who have their judge in God, and in his word a book of directions for their life, I everywhere pass by only reminiscently, because they belong to a period of development that has been lived through, and as petrifactions they may remain in their fixed place right along; in our time it is no longer the pious, but the liberals, who have the floor, and piety itself cannot keep from reddening its pale face with liberal coloring. But the liberals do not adore their judge in God, and do not unfold their life by the directions of the divine word, but regulate[218] themselves by man: they want to be not "divine" but "human," and to live so.
Man is the liberal's supreme being, man the judge of his life, humanity his directions, or catechism. God is spirit, but man is the "most perfect spirit," the final result of the long chase after the spirit or of the "searching in the depths of the Godhead," i. e. in the depths of the spirit.
Every one of your traits is to be human; you yourself are to be so from top to toe, in the inward as in the outward; for humanity is your calling.
Calling—destiny—task!—
What one can become he does become. A born poet may well be hindered by the disfavor of circumstances from standing on the high level of his time, and, after the great studies that are indispensable for this, producing consummate works of art; but he will make poetry, be he a plowman or so lucky as to live at the court of Weimar. A born musician will make music, no matter whether on all instruments or only on an oaten pipe. A born philosophical head can give proof of itself as university philosopher or as village philosopher. Finally, a born dolt, who, as is very well compatible with this, may at the same time be a sly-boots, will (as probably every one who has visited schools is in a position to exemplify to himself by many instances of fellow-scholars) always remain a blockhead, let him have been drilled and trained into the chief of a bureau, or let him serve that same chief as bootblack. Nay, the born shallow-pates indisputably form the most numerous class of men. And why, indeed, should not the same distinctions show themselves in the human species that are unmistakable in every species of beasts? The more gifted and the less gifted are to be found everywhere.