in."
His whole influence was now directed to withdrawing Prussia from the
blighting influence of Austria and Russia, and attempting to draw closer
the ties that bound her to Great Britain. On the outbreak of the Crimean
War he urged Frederick William to throw in his lot with the western powers,
and create a diversion in the north-east which would have forced Russia at
once to terms. The rejection of his advice, and the proclamation of
Prussia's attitude of "benevolent neutrality," led him in April 1854 to
offer his resignation, which was accepted.

Bunsen's life as a public man was now practically at an end. He retired
first to a villa on the Neckar near Heidelberg and later to Bonn. He
refused to stand for a seat, in the Liberal interest, in the Lower House of
the Prussian diet, but continued to take an active interest in politics,
and in 1855 published in two volumes a work, _Die Zeichen der Zeit: Briefe,
&c._, which exercised an immense influence in reviving the Liberal movement
which the failure of the revolution had crushed. In September 1857 Bunsen
attended, as the king's guest, a meeting of the Evangelical Alliance at
Berlin; and one of the last papers signed by Frederick William, before his
mind gave way in October, was that which conferred upon him the title of
baron and a peerage for life. In 1858, at the special request of the regent
(afterwards the emperor) William, he took his seat in the Prussian Upper
House, and, though remaining silent, supported the new ministry, of which
his political and personal friends were members.

Literary work was, however, his main preoccupation during all this period.
Two discoveries of ancient MSS. made during his stay in London, the one
containing a shorter text of the _Epistles of St Ignatius_, and the other
an unknown work _On all the Heresies_, by Bishop Hippolytus, had already
led him to write his _Hippolytus and his Age: Doctrine and Practice of Rome
under Commodus and Severus_ (1852). He now concentrated all his efforts
upon a translation of the Bible with commentaries. While this was in
preparation he published his _God in History_, in which he contends that
the progress of mankind marches parallel to the conception of God formed
within each nation by the highest exponents of its thought. At the same
time he carried through the press, assisted by Samuel Birch, the concluding
volumes of his work (published in English as well as in German) _Egypt's
Place in Universal Hi