e New," takes a somewhat different position in reference to
religion. Even for him, the whole idea of God is abolished and replaced by
the idea of the cosmos; but he makes this cosmos the object of religious
worship, and has exactly the same feeling of absolute dependence in regard
to it, which, according to Schleiermacher, constitutes the nature of
religion. When Arthur Schopenhauer or {191} Eduard von Hartmann bring forth
their pessimistic accusations against the universe, his religious sensation
reacts against it in the same manner as the organism against the prick of a
needle. This pessimism, he says, acts upon reason as an absurdity, but upon
sensation as blasphemy. "We demand the same piety for our cosmos that the
devout of old demanded for his God. If wounded, our feeling for the cosmos
simply reacts in a religious manner." While, therefore, Strauss, to the
question, "Are we still Christians?" gives an emphatic "No," he answers the
question, "Have we still a religion?" with "Yes or No, according to the
spirit of the inquiry."

Among men of science who wrote about Darwinism, Oskar Schmidt, in his
before-quoted publication, "The Doctrine of Descent and Darwinism," seems
to take exactly the same position in reference to religion. At least, he
unreservedly professes monism, rejects all teleological conceptions as
imperfections, speaks of the caprice of a personal God, and sees the
conception that the idea of God is immanent in human nature invalidated by
the fact "that many millions in the most cultivated nations, and among them
the most eminent and lucid thinkers, have not the consciousness of a
personal God; those millions of whom the heroic Strauss became the
spokesman."

Haeckel, it is true, mentions Strauss only in the preface of the fourth
edition of his "Natural History of Creation," but here he greets "The Old
Faith and the New" as the confession which he also makes, and thus gives us
an express right to place him in this class, although he calls his worship
of the universe religion; {192} it is, however, a classification which his
whole position compelled us to give him. It is true, he speaks very warmly
of his own religion, which is founded on the clear knowledge of nature and
its inexhaustible abundance of manifestations, and which, as "simple
religion of nature," will in the future act upon the course of development
of mankind, ennobling and perfecting it in a far higher degree than the
various ecclesiast