ce of parts; otherwise many individuals would at least
have been moved to a more sparing judgment upon it, and in the first place
they would take in the import of the title.

This book shows the fatal result of the renunciation of the Church system
of belief. The subject of the tale simply experiences moral annihilation;
but the object of his affection, whose mind he had been the means of
unsettling in her faith, burst through the boundaries which humanity has
placed, and the moral order of the world imposes: they perish both,--each
at odds with self, with God, and with human society: only for him there
yet remains room for further development. Then the curtain falls,--that is
right, according to artistic rule of composition; true and necessary
according to the views of those who hold the faith of the Church of
England; and from a theological point of view, no other solution could be
expected from the book than that which it has given.

But here the author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful
hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation's philosophical and
theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old,
they will exclaim, "That man is a criminal! stone him!"

I wish you could let him know how deeply I feel for him, without ever
having seen him; and how I desire to admonish him to accept and endure
this fatality, as, in the nature of things, he must surely have
anticipated it; and as he has pointed out and defended the freedom of the
spirit, so must he now (and I believe he will) show in himself, and make
manifest to the world, the courage, active in deed, cheerful in power, of
that free spirit.

It is presumptuous to intrude into the fate and mystery of life in the
case of any man, and more especially of a man so remarkable; but the
consciousness of community of spirits, of knowing, and endeavoring after
what is morally good, and true, and perfect, and of the yearning after
every real disciple of the inner religion of Christians, impels me to
suggest to you to tell him from me, that I believe the spasm of his
spiritual efforts would sooner be calmed, and the solution of the great
problem would sooner be found, if he were to live for a time among _us_; I
mean, if he resided for a time in one of the German universities. We
Germans have been for seventy years working as thinkers, inquirers, poets,
seers, also as men of action, to pull down the old and to erect the new
Zion; each great