 When human beings in the course of their history acquire new and different wishes, they tend also to worship new and different divinities. Whereas the ancient Greco-Roman pagans, and even the ancient Hebrews, were mainly concerned to secure blessedness in the form of long life and temporal prosperity, the early Christians sought their blessedness in eternity or “eternal life”. Feuerbach closely associates this shift from a concern with temporal blessedness to a concern with eternal blessedness with the Christian emphasis on creation ex nihilo, which he contrasts both with the Hebrew account of creation as involving the forming and ordering of pre-existent elements, and the limitation of the Greco-Roman gods to being able to prolong the lives of mortals, and securing their blessedness in this life, without being able to confer immortality upon them. The freedom from natural necessity ascribed by early Christian thinkers to God is interpreted by Feuerbach as an expression of the wish of these Christians to be free themselves from the constraints of material existence.