It would not be fair to pile on the Christian Church the blame for all this. It had, no doubt, its part to play in the whole great scheme, namely, to accentuate the self-motive; and it played the part very thoroughly and successfully. For it must be remembered (what I have again and again insisted on) that in the pagan cults it was always the salvation of the CLAN, the TRIBE, the people that was the main consideration; the advantage of the individual took only a very secondary part. But in Christendom--after the communal enthusiasms of apostolic days and of the medieval and monastic brotherhoods and sisterhoods had died down--religion occupied itself more and more with each man or woman's INDIVIDUAL salvation, regardless of what might happen to the community; till, with the rise of Protestantism and Puritanism, this tendency reached such an extreme that, as some one has said, each man was absorbed in polishing up his own little soul in a corner to himself, in entire disregard to the damnation which might come to his neighbor. Religion, and Morality too, under the commercial regime became, as was natural, perfectly selfish. It was always: "Am _I_ saved? Am _I_ doing the right thing? Am _I_ winning the favor of God and man? Will my claims to salvation be allowed? Did _I_ make a good bargain in allowing Jesus to be crucified for me?" The poison of a diseased self-consciousness entered into the whole human system. As I say, one must not blame the Christians too much for all this--partly because, AFTER the communal periods which I have just mentioned, Christianity was evidently deeply influenced by the rise of COMMERCIALISM, to which during the last two centuries it has so carefully and piously adapted itself; and partly because--if our view is anywhere near right--this microbial injection of self-consciousness was just the necessary work which (in conjunction with commercialism) it HAD to perform. But though one does not blame Christianity one cannot blind oneself to its defects--the defects necessarily arising from the part it had to play. When one compares a healthy Pagan ritual--say of Apollo or Dionysus--including its rude and crude sacrifices if you like, but also including its whole-hearted spontaneity and dedication to the common life and welfare--with the morbid self-introspection of the Christian and the eternally recurring question "What shall I do to be saved?"--the comparison is not favorable to the latter. There is (at any rate in modern days) a mawkish milk-and-wateriness about the Christian attitude, and also a painful self-consciousness, which is not pleasant; and though Nietzsche's blonde beast is a sufficiently disagreeable animal, one almost thinks that it were better to be THAT than to go about with one's head meekly hanging on one side, and talking always of altruism and self-sacrifice, while in reality one's heart was entirely occupied with the question of one's own salvation. There is besides a lamentable want