Neitzche’s Despair.
Mr. Fred J. Brooke writes of him: “What he lost when he exchanged God and prayer for the merciless exaltation of Might he himself acknowledged with pathetic eloquence.
He wrote: —
“Never more wilt thou pray, never more worship, never more repose in boundless trust. Thou renouncest the privilege of standing before an ultimate wisdom, an ultimate mercy, an ultimate power, and unharnessing thy thoughts. Thou hast no watcher and friend, for thy seven solitudes. Thou livest without, gazing upon a mountain that hast snow on its head and fire in its heart. There is no Redeemer for thee, none to promise a better life; there is no more reason in that which happens, no love in that which shall happen to thee; thy heart hath now no resting place where it needeth only to find, not to seek; thou refuseth any ultimate peace, thou desireth the eternal recurrence of war and peace. Man of self-denial, wilt thou deny thyself all this? Whence will thou gain the strength? No one ever had such strength.
How his light went out whilst still comparatively young (he died at the age of 54) is told in these sad words: ―
“But his troubles were never cured, and he became increasingly morbid. He was quite alone, and he needed stronger and stronger sleeping drafts to counteract the gloom and melancholy of his sleepless nights. He quarreled even with his own sister. In the last days of 1888 the catastrophe came. He had a paralytic stroke and was mentally deranged. He was removed to an asylum, but never recovered.”
The testimony of Dr, C. A. Salmond, Edinburgh, is: ―
The good tree of the old theology is vastly preferable to the Upas tree of the new “By its fruits ye may know it.” The old theology produced a Luther, a Knox, a Bunyan, a Chalmers, a Duff, a Livingstone, a Wesley, a Whitefield, as in earlier times it inspired the glorious company of the Apostles and martyrs. What world-uplifters of that ilk has the new theology produced, either in Germany or among ourselves? He is a foolish man, and that is a foolish nation, who, having tasted with appreciation the old wine, is seduced into preferring the new. In every respect “the old is better.”