nd are satisfied with the foul stream in
which weak minded theologians have washed their dirty linen for
centuries, while we educated people could support ourselves on the
fruits that philosophy and natural philosophy pluck from the tree of
knowledge. I, too, once held the same aristocratic notions. But I can
no longer reconcile myself to them. For--let alone every thing else--I
do not believe that it would be dangerous for the masses, if they were
educated to the truth instead of to a conventional fable, such as our
histories of dogmas offer them. But even if certain village and city
churches should become still more empty, than is now the case in
consequence of the deadness and constantly decreasing reality in our
forms of worship, has the state duties to perform only toward the
uneducated? Can it, without danger, lose in the eyes of the educated
that credit for veracity, which it might so easily maintain, if it did
not take sides, and venture to decide questions of conscience by state
institutions? Has it not also responsibilities toward the great strata
_between_ the educated and the simple people, those who will be
strengthened and almost confirmed in their own frivolity by all these
partly known, partly unknown things? The evil of shallowness and
secularization in its worst sense existing in these circle, the
preponderance of thoughtless pleasure, the whole despicable materialism
of our times--do you really suppose, my friend, that all this is to be
remedied by throwing up a dam composed of the crumbling ruins of a
faith, which for centuries the elements have shaken, disintegrated, and
scarcely left one stone upon another? I cannot believe it, even if I
desired to do so, and the patching and mending of the tottering
structure seems to me more wicked and dangerous, than erecting a new
dam--or at least measuring and marking out the foundations, on which
our children's children may put up the structure."

"Our children's children already? Oh! you sanguine mortal!"

"You are right. Who can tell? And yet how quickly intellectual
transitions take place now, in comparison with former days, when the
intercourse between minds was effected with so much greater difficulty!
Has a century elapsed since the time when Lessing's Nathan was a fact,
a challenge, a single burning need of that great heart, until now, when
his timid gospel of toleration for all religions has become a
commonplace, and honest toleration even of the irr