almost all European countries had an opportunity to study the type close at hand, wherever the religious neurosis—­or as I call it, “the religious mood”—­made its latest epidemical outbreak and display as the “Salvation Army”—­If it be a question, however, as to what has been so extremely interesting to men of all sorts in all ages, and even to philosophers, in the whole phenomenon of the saint, it is undoubtedly the appearance of the miraculous therein—­namely, the immediate succession of opposites, of states of the soul regarded as morally antithetical:  it was believed here to be self-evident that a “bad man” was all at once turned into a “saint,” a good man.  The hitherto existing psychology was wrecked at this point, is it not possible it may have happened principally because psychology had placed itself under the dominion of morals, because it believed in oppositions of moral values, and saw, read, and interpreted these oppositions into the text and facts of the case?  What?  “Miracle” only an error of interpretation?  A lack of philology?

48.  It seems that the Latin races are far more deeply attached to their Catholicism than we Northerners are to Christianity generally, and that consequently unbelief in Catholic countries means something quite different from what it does among Protestants—­namely, a sort of revolt against the spirit of the race, while with us it is rather a return to the spirit (or non-spirit) of the race.

We Northerners undoubtedly derive our origin from barbarous races, even as regards our talents for religion—­we have poor talents for it.  One may make an exception in the case of the Celts, who have theretofore furnished also the best soil for Christian infection in the North:  the Christian ideal blossomed forth in France as much as ever the pale sun of the north would allow it.  How strangely pious for our taste are still these later French skeptics, whenever there is any Celtic blood in their origin!  How Catholic, how un-German does Auguste Comte’s Sociology seem to us, with the Roman logic of its instincts!  How Jesuitical, that amiable and shrewd cicerone of Port Royal, Sainte-Beuve, in spite of all his hostility to Jesuits!  And even Ernest Renan:  how inaccessible to us Northerners does the language of such a Renan appear, in whom every instant the merest touch of religious thrill throws his refined voluptuous and comfortably couching soul off its balance!  Let us repeat after him these fine sentences—­and what wickedness and haughtiness is immediately aroused by way of answer in our probably less beautiful but harder souls, that is to say, in our more German souls!—­“DISONS DONC hardiment que la religion est un PRODUIT de L’HOMME normal, que L’HOMME est le plus dans le vrai Quant il est le plus RELIGIEUX et le plus assure