and fine trained hounds, that he could send into the history of the human soul, to drive his game together.  In vain:  again and again he experiences, profoundly and bitterly, how difficult it is to find assistants and dogs for all the things that directly excite his curiosity.  The evil of sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting-domains, where courage, sagacity, and subtlety in every sense are required, is that they are no longer serviceable just when the “Big hunt,” and also the great danger commences,—­it is precisely then that they lose their keen eye and nose.  In order, for instance, to divine and determine what sort of history the problem of knowledge and conscience has hitherto had in the souls of homines religiosi, a person would perhaps himself have to possess as profound, as bruised, as immense an experience as the intellectual conscience of Pascal; and then he would still require that wide-spread heaven of clear, wicked spirituality, which, from above, would be able to oversee, arrange, and effectively formulize this mass of dangerous and painful experiences.—­But who could do me this service!  And who would have time to wait for such servants!—­they evidently appear too rarely, they are so improbable at all times!  Eventually one must do everything oneself in order to know something; which means that one has much to do!—­But a curiosity like mine is once for all the most agreeable of vices—­pardon me!  I mean to say that the love of truth has its reward in heaven, and already upon earth.

46.  Faith, such as early Christianity desired, and not infrequently achieved in the midst of a skeptical and southernly free-spirited world, which had centuries of struggle between philosophical schools behind it and in it, counting besides the education in tolerance which the Imperium Romanum gave—­this faith is not that sincere, austere slave-faith by which perhaps a Luther or a Cromwell, or some other northern barbarian of the spirit remained attached to his God and Christianity, it is much rather the faith of Pascal, which resembles in a terrible manner a continuous suicide of reason—­a tough, long-lived, worm-like reason, which is not to be slain at once and with a single blow.  The Christian faith from the beginning, is sacrifice the sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of spirit, it is at the same time subjection, self-derision, and self-mutilation.  There is cruelty and religious Phoenicianism in this faith, which is adapted to a tender, many-sided, and very fastidious conscience, it takes for granted that the subjection of the spirit is indescribably painful, that all the past and all the habits of such a spirit resist the absurdissimum, in the form of which “faith” comes to it.  Modern men, with their obtuseness as regards all Christian nomenclature, have no longer the sense for the terribly superlative conception which was implied to an antique taste by the paradox