Insofar, then, it was certain in advance what would be the inviter's fate, even if nothing else had contributed to his doom. The absolute,[23] or all which makes for an absolute standard, becomes by that very fact the victim. For men are willing enough to practice sympathy and self-denial, are willing enough to strive for wisdom, etc.; but they wish themselves to determine the standard and to have that read: "to a certain degree." They do not wish to do away with all these splendid virtues. On the contrary, they want--at a bargain and in all comfort--to have the appearance and the name of practicing them. Truly divine compassion is therefore necessarily the victim so soon as it shows itself in this world. It descends on earth out of compassion for mankind, and yet it is mankind who trample upon it. And whilst it is wandering about among them, scarcely even the sufferer dares to flee to it, for fear of mankind. The fact is, it is most important for the world to keep up the appearance of being compassionate; but this it made out by divine compassion to be a falsehood--and therefore: away with divine compassion! But now the inviter represented precisely this divine compassion--and therefore he was sacrificed, and therefore even those that suffered fled from him; for they comprehended (and, humanly speaking, very exactly), what is true of most human infirmities, that one is better off to remain what one is than to be helped by him. In the second place: the inviter likewise had an other, and altogether different, conception than the purely human one as to what constitutes man's misery. And in this sense only he was intent on helping; for he had with him neither money, nor medicine, nor anything else of this kind. Indeed, the inviter's appearance is so altogether different from what human compassion wold imagine it that he is a downright offense to men. In a purely human sense there is something positively cruel--something outrageous, something so exasperating as to make one wish to kill that person--in the fact of his inviting to him the poor and the sick and the suffering, and then not being able to do anything for them, except to promise them remission of their sins. "Let us be human, man is no spirit. And when a person is about to die of starvation and you say to him: I promise you the gracious remission of your sins--that is revolting cruelty. In fact it is ridiculous, though too serious a matter to laugh about."