tolic 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
of grit and substance abou