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THE EGO AND HIS OWN

disrespectful heir, who even took away the sanctity of
the fathers' sabbath to hallow his Sunday, and inter-
rupted the course of time to begin at himself with a
new chronology; we know him, and know that it is--
the Christian. But does he remain forever young, and
is he to-day still the new man, or will he too be super-
seded, as he has superseded the " ancients " ?

The fathers must doubtless have themselves begotten

the young one who entombed them. Let us then peep
at this act of generation.

" To the ancients the world was a truth," says

Feuerbach, but he forgets to make the important ad-
dition, " a truth whose untruth they tried to get back
of, and at last really did." What is meant by those
words of Feuerbach will be easily recognized if they
are put alongside the Christian thesis of the " vanity
and transitoriness of the world." For, as the Chris-
tian can never convince himself of the vanity of the
divine word, but believes in its eternal and unshake-
able truth, which, the more its depths are searched,
must all the more brilliantly come to light and
triumph, so the ancients on their side lived in the feel-
ing that the world and mundane relations (e. g. the
natural ties of blood) were the truth before which
their powerless " I " must bow. The very thing on
which the ancients set the highest value is spurned by
Christians as the valueless, and what they recognized
as truth these brand as idle lies; the high significance
of the fatherland disappears, and the Christian must
regard himself as " a stranger on earth "; * the sanc-

* Heb. 11. 13.

MEN OF THE OLD TIME AND THE NEW 19

tity of funeral rites, from which sprang a work of art
like the Antigone of Sophocles, is designated as a
paltry thing (" Let the dead bury their dead "); the
infrangible truth of family ties is represented as an
untruth which one cannot promptly enough get clear
of; * and so in everything.

If we now see that to the two sides opposite things

appear as truth, to one the natural, to the other the
intellectual, to one earthly things and relations, to the
other heavenly (the heavenly fatherland, " Jerusalem
that is above," etc.), it still remains to be considered
how the new time and that undeniable reversal could
come out of antiquity. But the ancients themselves
worked toward making their truth a lie.

Let us plunge at once into the midst of the most

brilliant years of the ancients, into the Periclean cen-
tury. Then the Sophistic culture was spreading, and
Greece made a pastime of what had hitherto been to
her a monstrously serious matter.

The fathers had been enslaved by the undisturbed

power of existing things too long for the posterity not
to have to learn by bitter experience to feel themselves.
Therefore the Sophists, with courageous sauciness,
pronounce the reassuring words, " Don't be bluffed!"
and diffuse the rationalistic doctrine, " Use your
understanding, your wit, your mind, against every-
thing; it is by having a good and well-drilled under-
standing that one gets through the world best, pro-
vides for himself the best lot, the pleasantest life"
Thus they recognize in mind man's true weapon

* Mark 10. 29.