This is an excerpt from chapter 11, "The Necessity of an Aristocracy" (the last paragraph which I highlighted in bold is the most important one in my opinion)
But with this, we must now pass on to the third of the ingredients in the idea of
democracy that I have imagined its protagonists to have most at heart. Along with the
concern for the rights of minorities and a demand that opportunity be spread before all
men equally, which we have just finished examining, I detect, in and behind all of the
movements and philosophy that bear the democratic label, a basic solicitude for the wellbeing
of the common, most ordinary man, and a quite exceptional estimate of his worth.
It is maintained that this concern and this faith must be traced, ultimately, to the leaven of
Christianity, and I am not now interested in combating the argument. But I am inclined to
trace it less to any teaching of Jesus than to the Church’s metaphysical doctrine of the
individual soul. As we have already seen, Jesus was certainly no proletarian revolutionist,
such as Socialists commonly try to make him. And I find in his teaching no more belief
that every man has infinite worth, as the Christians would have it, than that all men are
equal. In fact, I find no signs of any such theorizing about men. Jesus came with
something more than that. He loved men. But it is beyond dispute that he drew a sharp
line between those who had “eyes to see” and those who did not, between those who had
ears and heard with them and those whose blank faces showed all too plainly that they
could not make a thing out of what he was saying. For him the latter were virtually as the
dead. Indeed, he compared them to dogs and to swine, and he counseled his disciples not
to spend time on them. He did not spend time on them himself. He concentrated on those
few, those very few, most perceptive and responsive ones whom he had gathered about
himself as disciples, and whom he was constantly calling to some quiet place apart where
he might try to communicate to them the mysteries of his innermost and deepest
experience. It is unmistakable that Jesus took men as he found them, and that for him
they were anything but equal.
But in any case, and no matter where Jesus stands in the matter, this idea that every man
has great worth and that society must be ordered in constant remembrance of it and
slavish regard for it, is one of the doctrines that make Christianity the enemy, even the
archenemy, of the highest end of man. It is romantic and dangerous nonsense. We shall
not go forward, whether as a nation or as a race, until we have ceased to value a man in
his relations to some metaphysical existence believed to be outside of or to follow after
his life on Earth. Religious people who insist that “all men are equal in the sight of God,”
thereby plainly reveal their conviction that men ought to be treated as equals here and
now. But so long as men continue to live, their first business is with what they can be and
with what they can do on the Earth. And to try to treat men as if they were all equal and
to set up human arrangements on the assumption that they are equal, when it is perfectly
obvious that they are nothing of the sort, is not only brazenly and impudently dishonest,
and therefore spiritually degenerating, but it is actually to court the doom that must
overtake any people so sunk in folly as to found its basic institutions and rest its life on a
hollow delusion. We shall never advance as a society, or even build solidly and durably,
except as we come to evaluate all men realistically in reference to what we may
reasonably expect of them here on this Earth, as creators, as mates, as persons able to
bear and to measure up to responsibility, and to fulfill some useful function. Any belief
about a Hereafter or a Beyond that does not somehow exalt, enrich, and strengthen life
here and now is our deadly poison. And any in our midst who are enticed by it and misled
by it are our deadly foes. This is basic.
