art their God and
Father, and that thou didst send Jesus thy Son, and the Holy Spirit who
was to testify of the truth. They can therefore have strength for every
grief of this life, and for the sorrows of death a bright hope of a
happy immortality.

"Now, my God, thou canst take everything from me, yea every earthly joy
and blessing; but leave me truth, and I have joy and blessing enough!"

It was the young Schiller who wrote these ecstatic words at a time when
he contemplated entering the ministry. A few years passed by, and all
was changed. He grew into a sincere admirer, we might say worshiper, of
the heathen faith. He complained that all the life and spirit were taken
out of the Bible by the Rationalists, but he did nothing to remedy their
error. He became absorbed in the spirit of classic times. The antiquity
of Greece was far dearer to him than that of Palestine, and his poetic
fancy was excited to a greater tension by the tales of heathen deities
than by the histories of the Bible. He was a devotee of Kant, and his
poetry was largely made up of that philosopher's metaphysics. Yet, in
Schiller's hand, abstractions became living pictures. He knew how to
speak clearly, and his popularity is evidence to the fact that his
generations of readers have plainly understood him.

While Schiller represented Kant in verse, Goethe did the same thing with
Schelling's philosophy. The influence of the latter poet on religion was
very pernicious. He expressed himself favorably of the Bible, but he
claimed that it could only educate the people up to a little higher
stage of intelligence and taste. He was intensely egotistic, and totally
indifferent to all religious belief. His false idolatry of art and his
enthusiasm arrayed for heathendom, in all the beautiful charms of the
most seductive poetry, had a tendency fatal to the cause of Christianity
and to all public and private virtue.[36] He expressed himself sometimes
as very favorable toward the Roman Catholic worship, and the adherents
of that faith quote his words of approbation with evident pride. In his
_Autobiography_ he pays some high compliments to the seven sacraments of
the Romanists. He made several visits to the beautiful little Catholic
church dedicated to St. Roch, situated just above Bingen on the Rhine.
He presented it with an altar-piece, and on one occasion said, "Whenever
I enter this church I always wish I were a Catholic priest." But
Goethe's love and admira