But the chief remedy of the ascetic priest was, after all, his reinterpretation of the feeling of guilt as "sin." The inner suffering was a punishment. The sick man was the sinner. Nietzsche compares the unfortunate who receives this explanation of his qualms with a hen round which a chalk circle has been drawn: he cannot get out. Wherever we look, for century after century, we see the hypnotic gaze of the sinner, staring--in spite of Job--at guilt as the only cause of suffering. Everywhere the evil conscience and the scourge and the hairy shirt and weeping and gnashing of teeth, and the cry of "More pain! More pain!" Everything served the ascetic ideal. And then arose epidemics like those of St. Vitus's dance and the flagellants, witches' hysteria and the wholesale delirium of extravagant sects (which still lingers in otherwise beneficially disciplined bodies such as the Salvation Army). The ascetic ideal has as yet no real assailants; there is no decided prophet of a new ideal. Inasmuch as since the time of Copernicus science has constantly tended to deprive man of his earlier belief in his own importance, its influence is rather favourable to asceticism than otherwise. At present the only real enemies and underminers of the ascetic ideal are to be found in the charlatans of that ideal, in its hypocritical champions, who excite and maintain distrust of it. As the senselessness of suffering was felt to be a curse, the ascetic ideal gave it a meaning; a meaning which brought a new flood of suffering with it, but which was better than none. In our day a new ideal is in process of formation, which sees in suffering a condition of life, a condition of happiness, and which in the name of a new culture combats all that we have hitherto called culture. [7] Compare Lassalle's theory of the original religion of Rome. G. Brandes; _Ferdinand Lassalle_ (London and New York, 1911), pp. 76 ff. 5. Among Nietzsche's works there is a strange book which bears the title, _Thus Spake Zarathustra_. It consists of four parts, written during the years 1883-85, each part in about ten days, and conceived chapter by chapter on long walks--"with a feeling of inspiration, as though each sentence had been shouted in my ear," as Nietzsche wrote in a private letter. The central figure and something of the form are borrowed from the Persian _Avesta_. Zarathustra is the mystical founder of a religion whom we usually call Zoroaster. His religion is the religion of purity; his wisdom is cheerful and dauntless, as that of one who laughed at his birth; his nature is light and flame. The eagle and the serpent, who share his mountain cave, the proudest and the wisest of beasts, are ancient Persian symbols.