Moral scepticism in Christianity. – Christianity, too, has made a great contribution to enlightenment: it taught moral scepticism in an extremely trenchant and effective way – accusing, embittering, but with untiring patience and refinement; it annihilated in every single man the faith in his ‘virtues’. It caused those great virtuous men, of whom there was no dearth in antiquity, to disappear forever from the face of the earth – those popular men who with a faith in their own perfection went about with the dignity of a toreador. When we now, educated in this Christian school of scepticism, read the moral books of antiquity, e.g. those of Seneca or Epictetus,4 we feel an amusing superiority and are full of secret insights and overviews, as if a child were speaking before an old man or an overenthusiastic young beauty were speaking before La Rochefoucauld:5 we know better what virtue is! In the end, however, we have applied this same scepticism also to all religious states and procedures, such as sin, repentance, grace, sanctification; and we have all allowed the worm to dig so deeply that even when reading Christian books we now have the same feeling of refined superiority and insight: we also know the religious feelings better! And it is time to know them well and to describe them well, for even the pious of the old faith are dying out: let us save their image and their type at least for knowledge!