life, it was the beneficent
powers in nature that most deeply impressed him, and he records how in
crude childish fashion he secretly reared an altar to these powers,
though an unlucky accident in the oblation prevented him from
repeating his act of worship.

Like other children, he was quick to see the inconsistency of the
creed he was taught with the actual facts of experience. One event in
his childhood, the earthquake of Lisbon, especially struck him as a
confounding commentary on the accepted belief in the goodness of God;
and the impression was deepened when in the following summer a violent
thunder-storm played havoc with some of the most treasured books in
his father's library. In all his soul's troubles, however, Goethe,
according to his own account, found refuge in a world where
questionings of the ways of Providence had never found an entrance. In
the Old Testament, and specially in the Book of Genesis, with its
picture of patriarchal life, he found a world which by engaging his
feelings and imagination worked with tranquilising effect (_stille
Wirkung_) on his spirit, distracted by his miscellaneous studies and
his varied interests. Of all the elements that entered into his early
culture, indeed, Goethe gives the first place to the Bible. "To it,
almost alone," he expressly says, "did I owe my moral education." To
the Bible as an incomparable presentment of the national life and
development of a people, and the most precious of possessions for
human culture, Goethe bore undeviating testimony at every period of
his life. It need hardly be said that his attitude towards the Bible
was divided by an impassable gulf from the attitude of traditional
Christianity. For Goethe it was a purely human production, the
fortunate birth of a time and a race which in the nature of things can
never be paralleled. What the Churches have found in it was not for
him its inherent virtue. Even in his youth it was in its picturesque
presentation of a primitive life that he found what satisfied the
needs of his nature. The spiritual aspirations of the Psalms, the
moral indignation of the prophets, found no response in him either in
youth or manhood. His ideal of life was never that of the saints, but
it was an ideal, as his record of his early religious experience
shows, which had its roots in the nature which had been allotted him.

To certain events in his early life Goethe assigned a decisive
influence on his future development