ly, criminal
stupidity, are permitted to display themselves in every street, and the
holiest things are used by cunning speculators for very worldly
purposes."

"What am I to answer?" said the Frau Professorin, with an expression of
the deepest anxiety. "You yourself are noble and pure enough in your
intentions, to be permitted without danger to your social duties, to
disclaim what we call duties toward God. But what would be the
consequence with the great majority, whose 'sensibilities are not so
delicate, to whom piety, unconscious devotion to an inscrutable being,
nay if you will, the _fear_ of God, is a necessary check to their
sensual natures, if you suddenly left them to themselves, and relieved
them of all responsibility? Or what compensation can you offer nobler
souls, of deeper feelings, that feel a need of sanctification, to make
amends for a destroyed or diminished confidence in the love of God? My
dear friend, if you had ever enjoyed the deep bliss of knowing yourself
a child of God, you would willingly overlook the vagueness, the
childish narrowness, that to pure reason this idea may seem to contain,
and understand that it is natural to consider innovators dangerous, or
even to strive to crush as enemies of mankind, those who threaten to
deprive their brothers of this consolation."

"I understand, I excuse it--and yet I ask that it may cease," replied
Edwin, "for really the danger with which the children of the world
threaten the children of God, is a purely imaginary one. The offence we
give is very harmless. No mind which, in your sense of the word, is
religiously disposed, will endure to think of the world without a
personal Creator. No seduction can take place where the germ of the
fall did not previously exist. And the vacillating or utterly frivolous
cannot be of so much importance to you as peace and tolerance. I cannot
forsee the future, but I have a conviction that the time will never
come, when all men will declare that they are of age and have outgrown
the childhood that renders them happy, any more than that political
freedom will ever become a necessity to all. Only let people cease to
measure differences in viewing the world by moral standards, to
regulate for the individual his capacities and wants, God and the
world, to call him to account for mere opinions which have a very
slight influence upon his actions. To be sure, those ideas of God,
freedom, immortality, which even the free thinker