The feeling of owing a debt to the deity has grown continuously for several centuries, always in the same proportion in which the idea of God and the consciousness of God have grown and become exalted among mankind. (The whole history of ethnic fights, victories, reconciliations, amalgamations, everything, in fact, which precedes the eventual classing of all the social elements in each great race synthesis, are mirrored in the hotch-potch genealogy of their gods, in the legends of their fights, victories, and reconciliations, Progress towards universal empires invariably means progress towards universal deities; despotism, with its subjugation of the independent nobility, always paves the way for some system or other of monotheism.) The appearance of the Christian god, as the record god up to this time, has for that very reason brought equally into the world the record amount of guilt consciousness. 109 This is a kind of madness of the will in the sphere of psychological cruelty which is absolutely unparalleled:--man's _will_ to find himself guilty and blameworthy to the point of inexpiability, his _will_ to think of himself as punished, without the punishment ever being able to balance the guilt, his _will_ to infect and to poison the fundamental basis of the universe with the problem of punishment and guilt, in order to cut off once and for all any escape out of this labyrinth of "fixed ideas," his will for rearing an ideal--that of the "holy God"--face to face with which he can have tangible proof of his own unworthiness. Alas for this mad melancholy beast man! 112-113 What is the meaning of ascetic ideals? In artists, nothing, or too much; in philosophers and scholars, a kind of "flair" and instinct for the conditions most favourable to advanced intellectualism; in women, at best an _additional_ seductive fascination, a little _morbidezza_ on a fine piece of flesh, the angelhood of a fat, pretty animal; in physiological failures and whiners (in the _majority_ of mortals), an attempt to pose as "too good" for this world, a holy form of debauchery, their chief weapon, in the battle with lingering pain and ennui; in priests, the actual priestly faith, their best engine of power, and also the supreme authority for power; in saints, finally a pretext for hibernation, their _novissima gloria cupido,_ their peace in nothingness ("God"), their form of madness. 121 All good things were once bad things; from every original sin has grown an original virtue. Marriage, for example, seemed for a long time a sin against the rights of the community; a man formerly paid a fine for the insolence of claiming one woman to himself. 144-145 The soft, benevolent yielding, sympathetic feelings--eventually valued so highly that they almost become "intrinsic values," were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors; gentleness was then a subject for shame, just as hardness is now. 145