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In the Jewish "Old Testament," the book of divine justice, there are men, things, and speeches of such impressive style that the world of Greek and Indian literature has nothing to place beside them. We stand with fear and reverence before these tremendous remnants of what human beings once were and will in the process suffer melancholy thoughts about old Asia and its protruding peninsula of Europe, which, in marked contrast to Asia, would like to represent the "progress of man." Naturally, whoever is, in himself, only a weak, tame domestic animal and who knows only the needs of domestic animals (like our educated people nowadays, including the Christians of "educated" Christianity), among these ruins such a man finds nothing astonishing or even anything to be sad about - a taste for the Old Testament is a touchstone with respect to "great" and "small": - perhaps he finds the New Testament, that book of grace, still preferable to his heart (in it there is a good deal of the really tender, stifling smell of over-pious and small-souled people). To have glued together this New Testament, a sort of rococo of taste in all respects, with the Old Testament into a single book, as the "Bible," and "the essential book," that is perhaps the greatest act of daring and "sin against the spirit" which literary Europe has on its conscience.