214
Avaunt, forbearance!—You suffer, and want us to be lenient towards you, when you, in your suffering, wrong both things and men. But what is the good of our leniency? You should be more cautious for your own sake. That is a fine way of compensating for your sufferings, to injure into the bargain your own judgments In reviling something, your own vengeance will redound on yourselves; you thereby dim your eyes, not those of others: you accustom yourselves to taking a wrong and distorted view of the things.
215
Moral of victims.—"Enthusiastic devotion, selfsacrifice these are the watchwords of your morals; and I readily believe that you, as you say, are sincere: only I know you better than you know yourselves, if your "honesty” is able to go in close companionship with these morals. From their height you look down upon that other sober morality which requires selfcontrol, severity, obedience; perhaps you even call it selfish, and indeed!—you are honest towards yourselves when it displeases you—it cannot help displeasing you! For in enthusiastically sacrificing yourselves and making victims of yourselves, you enjoy that rapturous thought now to be one with the powerful, be he God or man, to whom you devote yourselves: you revel in the consciousness of his power which is, in its turn, testified
