o mistake is possible."

He had said all this with great unction. The Count was silent a moment,
before he said: "Our table-talk has assumed so serious a turn and so
grave an import, that it would certainly be more proper to break off,
and either to reserve these explanations for a calmer hour, or wholly
drop them, since on these important subjects one is most easily
misunderstood."

"Because you now feel yourself completely defeated," said the Baron,
"you wish at all events to provide yourself with a safe retreat. I
should have thought it now became your duty, openly to confess, that
you have nothing to say on this point, unless you would undisguisedly
avow, that the almost forgotten scepticism of former times is dearer to
you than our holy religion."

"O speak!" cried Dorothea, forgetting herself.

"You see how pressingly you are called upon," said the mother, darting
a long and threatening look at Dorothea. Alfred too requested the Count
to explain how far he coincided with the opinions of the age on this
point.

"As I cannot entirely avoid it," said he, "I will briefly hint what I
have been able to observe; for as I have been now a year again in
Germany, every thing is not so strange to me as you suppose, though it
is but a short time back that I came to revisit my birthplace here. I
only wish I could divest you all of the prejudice with which, I
observe, you consider me, as a profane infidel. No, that is really not
my character; but I must reserve to myself the incontestable right of
being a Christian after my own manner. That there are now, as at all
times, really pious and enlightened spirits, and that these deserve our
respect, who would doubt? The need of faith has again proclaimed
itself, the spirit has knocked at almost every heart, and admonitions
have been heard, of various kinds, and from all quarters. A clear fresh
stream has once more poured from the eternal hills along the thirsty
plain, and the things and beings overtaken by it follow the force of
its waves: all feel irresistibly hurried along, and great and small,
strong and weak, are forced down with its current. Genuine as is the
enthusiasm which this has occasioned, yet has it happened here, as in
all historical events, that this phenomenon likewise has been clouded
by the multitude, by vanity and human weakness, and as it was once the
fashion to play the freethinker and the _esprit fort_, though many were
weak and superstitious, so it has no