His reply ran:
I dismiss you as of this date (date of postmark) from my service.
You are a refractory tongue. I have already found a new and more willing one.
My time, our time, has dawned.
I no longer need to treat you courteously.
So now I can close with the truth.
Hail the Anticross!
Signed
The Master of a Thousand Tongues
PEOPLE FEAR EACH OTHER
So I left the land of the Master of a Thousand Tongues and crossed the border into other countries.
I took up residence in one of the houses that they call hotels.
And there came all kinds of people who had known me when I was one of the thousand tongues.
There came a rich man, a poor man, a pious man, an unbeliever, a Jew, a Jew-hater, a heathen, a Christian, an agent of the Master of a Thousand Shadows, one who hoped for a world revolution and another who wished to maintain the world just as it is, one who wanted peace and another who desired war.
They had all read the truths that I had written. They came, some to question me, others to listen to me and a third group to corrupt me. And through all of them spoke the Antichrist.
Thus I sat each day – and thus I still sit today – in the hotel.
Many people seek me out, and all of them are convinced that I believe them and their words. However, I am protected by my fear of the Antichrist and am on my guard against the false words of my guests, even of those who are honest.
For sometimes they think they are speaking the truth when, in fact, the words belong to the Antichrist.
They themselves don’t know it. But I can understand. For just as I myself, when I was a soldier, sold my shadow to the Antichrist without realizing it, so have they unwittingly sold their words to the Antichrist, and out of their mouths come not the words themselves but what the Antichrist has transformed into the shadows of words.
Sometimes my visitors arrive together, the strong and the weak, the rich and the poor and so on.
And they offer one another their hands. However, they hate each other.
They would like to kill one another, but they talk with each other. And their words are so full of falsehoods and poison that it is worse than if they actually did kill one another.
They speak on friendly and murderous terms at the same time. It is the tongue of the Antichrist; it is their mother tongue.
The language of the Antichrist has become the mother tongue of mankind.
And instead of dreading the Antichrist they are afraid of one another. The poor fear the rich and vice versa, the Jew fears the anti-Semite and vice versa and so on.
For just as love and justice spring from fearlessness, so comes hatred from fear and injustice from fear.
Fear, however, is the daughter of the Antichrist. By this I mean man’s fear of his own kind.
The lion does not fear the lion, the tiger does not fear the tiger, the lamb does not fear the lamb, the ox does not fear the ox, the raven does not fear the raven, and the carp does not fear the carp – when one does not threaten the other. Fear can only emerge between one and another creature of the same species if there is hostility between them for some reason.
But people fear other people without cause; in fact, the fear people have of each other is not the consequence but the origin of their hostilities and wars. Animals fear humans. They fear them more than they fear their natural foes among the other animals. The strongest of the four-legged beasts of prey fears a snake’s venom, but both the serpent and the beast of prey fear man equally.
Since he is to be feared by all creation, man may truly be the master.
But, since he is also afraid of his own kind, he is thus not the absolute Lord of Creation.
If man were not afraid of his own kind he would have no fear of the tempter, of the Devil, of the Antichrist.
The Antichrist plants people’s fear of other people into their hearts so that he may not himself become weak.
He sows fear. And from this seed sprouts discord.
As one person fears another individual, so does one nation fear another nation.
And within each nation each of the individual citizens fears the other.
And as soon as all the individual members of a nation fear a neighbouring nation more than the individuals fear one another, war starts.
The soldier who goes to war fears his superior, but the superior and the soldier both fear the enemy, that is to say, the other nation, even more.
Therefore, there will never be peace in the world so long as the fear of men towards other men exists.
Similarly, the fear of God cannot grow in the world as long as man fears man more than he does God himself.
Truly, the Antichrist sows man’s fear of his own kind to prevent him from fearing God.
Fearing God, that is to say, not only loving God but also loving each other.
To fear man, however, is to hate man, to abandon God and to be in the presence of the Antichrist.
And this is the condition of the world today.
We are further than ever from the hour when the predator will befriend the prey.
Not even man can befriend his fellow man.
All the animals of creation fear humans. But people’s fear of one another today is even greater than animals’ fear of people.
For man knows frightfulness of his own kind better than animals.
This is the hour in which, as it is written, man is worse than a ferocious animal.
THE TEMPTERS
A man who claimed to be righteous came to me and said: ‘I come from the country where the Master of a Thousand Tongues, in whose service you have been, lives.’
‘Aren’t you going to return?’ I enquired. ‘They are lacking in righteous men there!’
‘They drove me out,’ said the false righteous man, ‘and others with me. In all other countries of the world righteous men are downtrodden and must suffer. But in this country they are banishing justice entirely. They are seating wrong upon the throne of right. They are removing the bandage from the eyes of Justice.’
‘So they are finally allowing her to see?’
‘No,’ replied the just man, ‘they aren’t removing the bandage so that she can see. Although even that would be false. For it is the nature of Justice to judge without seeing. Her delicate hands, which measure and weigh, are surer than the eye. She has to apply not the judgement of the eye, visual justice, but the scales, the judgement of the hands, manual justice. Truly, when Justice can see, she ceases to be Justice. But the unrighteous haven’t removed the bandage from her eyes to let her see! They have removed it in order to make her blind. They have poked out her eyes.
‘At that point the righteous left the country.
‘Yet we cannot abandon Justice, although we, the righteous have been driven out. And we endeavour to act justly towards the country that blinded her.
‘I have long wondered why these people poked out the eyes of Justice. And I believe I have discovered the reason: the people were acting foolishly, not wickedly. By no means do they understand the nature of Justice. From the beginning they had feared that she might one day take off her blindfold and see. And, as fools are impatient, they anticipated her. But when they saw her eyes they were terrified and pricked them out. They are poor fools.’
‘So what do you ask of me?’ I enquired of the just man.
‘That you should be just towards this country,’ he replied. ‘That’s why I’ve come to you.’
‘I bow before your sense of justice,’ said I, ‘but I cannot myself be just. I am a man. I have fear of the Antichrist – I will try to take vengeance on him. And the Lord Himself will one day decide whether I am worthy of salvation.
‘I respect the just man. But I am not great enough to understand him. I am only an ordinary man. I fear evil. And I hate it.’
At this, the man who thought he was righteous left me, and clearly he resented me.
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And when I asked myself why he resented me more than he did the unjust people who had driven him out and blinded Justice it awakened in me the suspicion that the Antichrist was also working within and gnawing at the supposedly righteous man.
I confess that since this meeting I fear even righteous men, those who are too just, those who want to understand everything and those who say they can forgive everything.
There certainly exist men of that sort. But people who can both hate and love and who hate hatred and love love – these are men of my kind.
For I fear that the Antichrist hides himself even behind the man who is all too just, whose righteousness is false.
There next came to me a man who called himself unjust. He spoke to me with pride and said: ‘I am but one of the many millions of unrighteous men; an anonymous unrighteous man, but of that I am also proud. Soon, I will be even less of a name than I am today, for the number of the unrighteous grows with every hour, and soon there will be countless billions, like ants.
‘I, too, come from the country of the Master of a Thousand Tongues, in whose service you once were.
‘I come because I saw that you were visited by my enemy, our enemy, the righteous man. What he told you was lies and falsehoods. I come to tell you the truth.’
I replied: ‘Since you yourself say that you are unrighteous, how then can you accuse a righteous man of doing unrighteous things?’
The unrighteous man said: ‘A change has recently come to the world. It is now such that the unrighteous are right and the righteous are wrong. I therefore wish to inform you that you are unjust when you say that the righteous man is right.
‘For you must remember that there are only thirty-six righteous men in the whole world but millions of unrighteous – and soon there will be billions. How can thirty-six poor individuals continue to be right against billions? Would it be just if thirty-six men were able to continue in the right against billions?’
‘Right is right,’ I retorted, ‘and wrong is wrong, and numbers have got nothing to do with it.’
‘How has right ever prevailed except by force of numbers?’ asked the unrighteous man. ‘Many thousands of people one day acknowledged that this was right and that was wrong, and ever since that day there has been such a distinction.’
‘No,’ said I. ‘It is always individuals who have handed down laws and proclaimed what is right – Lycurgus, for example, and Moses and Muhammad and Jesus Christ. For right is divine, and God chooses not a thousand spokesmen at the same time but only one, and it is by this that we recognize that right and justice are divine. For example, as is customary, numbers decide the election of a beauty queen but not who is the goddess of justice. There may be some who say that the queen of beauty isn’t beautiful enough. For the choice was decided by numbers. And whenever numbers alone decide something, there are always some, more or less numerous, who have a different opinion. But, when God decides, there can be no disagreement. Beauty is a matter of taste, but justice isn’t. When, however, justice is decided by numbers it is injustice.’
‘But individuals can also err!’ said the unrighteous man.
‘When they err,’ I said, ‘their law is arbitrary. It may be that thousands or millions or even billions see this despotism as right and just. However, these thousands and millions and billions only do so because arbitrariness is disguised as justice.’
‘It is true that God proclaims His justice through the mouths of individuals. But this justice is alive in all men without distinction. They don’t know what it is called or how it will appear before it is proclaimed, but they have innate knowledge of its nature, and they have already prepared to receive it.
‘It is true, and in this respect I must admit that you’re right, in this world sometimes one expects a guest named so-and-so, but there comes another who calls himself so-and-so, and he is given the reception that has been prepared for the real guest, since his hosts don’t realize that he isn’t genuine. But the impostor always calls himself authentic, the thief honest and the murderer a lover. He who wishes to pass off a lie as the truth calls himself a truth lover. The murderer comes in the night with sweet words and begs entry. The unrighteous man speaks of righteousness – as you have, in fact, just done to me. Why don’t you say that your unrighteousness is wrong? Why do you call it right? Why don’t you say that numbers make might, instead of saying that they make right? Because you want to corrupt me!’
‘You do me wrong,’ said the unrighteous man. ‘For one of the demands of justice is that numbers should decide. If, for example, ten men are not of one mind, the issue in question is put to a vote. And if seven are for and three against, these three follow the seven.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘if ten reasonable and just men come together, then the vote is just. But if nine fools are brought together with one wise man, the wise man is right and the nine fools are wrong. A vote can only be taken among equals. And just as you cannot add together two apples and four fish so you cannot sum together the votes of two wise men and four fools. It is true that two and four are always six. But only when the numbers two and four represent objects, animals or men of the same kind.’
‘So thirty-six men can be in the right against billions?’ asked the unjust man.
‘Of course. Even one man can be in the right against billions.’
‘Then you shall be made to feel the power of the billions,’ the unjust man said menacingly.
‘And afterwards all these billions will feel the power of right!’ I retorted.
And he departed in discord because there was no other way for him to leave.
Next a weak man came to me, one of those who are today the most helpless victims of those in power, namely, a Jew.
‘I come to you,’ he began, ‘because I have just seen my enemy, the unrighteous man, go through your door. And I must tell you that the powerful are unjust. They torment the weak. They say that a majority really equals right and justice.
‘They violate and mock not only the law of hospitality but also the law of humanity.
‘The law of hospitality is itself a mockery of humanity.
‘For what kind of world is this where it first had to be established by a special law that one man is a host and another a guest? Wasn’t it God who gave us houses? And if God gave no house to a particular man, may he not reside in the house of his neighbour, which is also the house of God? Let us, however, admit this: that whoever owns a house may be proud of it and may also be proud of offering friendship. We Jews also had a home once. But for us it was written that the stranger in our house is to be treated as a fellow countryman. And all among us observed this command. Yes, we even passed on this command to the strangers. And they learned when they were with us – although they quickly forgot – to offer hospitality, which is better than receiving it.
‘Now, however, they say that we aren’t worthy of their houses.
‘Are these then their houses and their lands? Is man therefore a tree that he cannot move from place to place? And don’t we transplant trees so that they grow in other countries? At what point in time does a people begin to regard this or that country as its own? Hasn’t every people taken its land from another people? Did it buy land? If I deprive my neighbour of his property, does it become mine after ten, a hundred or a thousand years have elapsed? If the former owner returns after a certain period, do I have the right to expel him? Only He who has given also has the right to take. And since God Himself gave countries to the peoples but none to us, is it not He Himself who sends us to the various countries that belong to Him and Him alone? Have we, perhaps, sinned more than the owners of the countries? Suppose there were really hosts and guests – that God was not the only host and all men were not His guests – have we faulted more than our hosts? And isn’t a fault a fault just as a virtue is a virtue, regardless of who has faulted or who is virtuous?’
‘God has allocated the houses,’ I said, ‘and also homelessness. He has granted justice – and also
injustice. He has granted reason and also stupidity. Someone who has reason, as you do, and yet demands justice on earth, is wrong. If you had a country of your own, would you accept the people who came to visit you when they no longer had a country and not require greater virtue from them than you demand of your own kind? And, if you are of the opinion that God gives houses and countries, you must also know that He alone gave your people the Law. He alone made the Jews powerless. And He alone made men unjust. Because you have suffered so much injustice do you wish to inflict still more injustice on others? When you see injustice perpetrated upon a Jew, are you pained by the injustice alone, or are you doubly pained because it is a Jew who is suffering?’
‘Both,’ said the weak man.
‘If that is so,’ I replied, ‘it might happen that you will one day become a cruel man. You carry the seed of injustice within you.