Church immediately began to raise her head again and Faith began to show
fresh signs of life; which, to be sure, in keeping with the times, was
partly poetical in its nature. On the other hand, in the more than
thirty years of peace which followed, leisure and prosperity furthered
the building up of science and the spread of knowledge in an
extraordinary degree: the consequence of which is what I have indicated,
the dissolution and threatened fall of religion. Perhaps the time is
approaching which has so often been prophesied, when religion will take
her departure from European humanity, like a nurse which the child has
outgrown: the child will now be given over to the instructions of a
tutor. For there is no doubt that religious doctrines which are founded
merely on authority, miracles and revelations, are only suited to the
childhood of humanity. Everyone will admit that a race, the past
duration of which on the earth all accounts, physical and historical,
agree in placing at not more than some hundred times the life of a man
of sixty, is as yet only in its first childhood.

_Demopheles_. Instead of taking an undisguised pleasure in prophesying
the downfall of Christianity, how I wish you would consider what a
measureless debt of gratitude European humanity owes to it, how greatly
it has benefited by the religion which, after a long interval, followed
it from its old home in the East. Europe received from Christianity
ideas which were quite new to it, the Knowledge, I mean, of the
fundamental truth that life cannot be an end-in-itself, that the true
end of our existence lies beyond it. The Greeks and Romans had placed
this end altogether in our present life, so that in this sense they may
certainly be called blind heathens. And, in keeping with this view of
life, all their virtues can be reduced to what is serviceable to the
community, to what is useful in fact. Aristotle says quite naively,
_Those virtues must necessarily be the greatest which are the most