Such things cannot but deepen the hold these
elect spirits have and shall have upon men unto all time.

Of religion Kant conceived a noble idea, but he did not find it realised
in the Churches of his day. Sacerdotalism, even in its mildest forms,
was abhorrent to him. During his manhood he never entered a church door,
a fact which is a source of deep pain to many of his most enthusiastic
biographers. Once only did Kant take his place in the procession which
made its way to the cathedral on an especial day in the year, and was
joined by the rector and professors of the university, but on arriving at
the door he turned back and spent the hour of service in the retirement
of his rooms. To his free soul it was a performance, professional and
sectarian, and in consequence, something of a profanation. His disciple
Hegel must have been moved by similar feelings when he replied to the
questioning of his old housekeeper why he did not attend Divine service,
"Thinking is also a Divine service!"

Nature had an irresistible fascination for him. He learnt that also from
his revered mother, whose joy it was to take her child into the world of
Nature, where the Soul of the worlds is so conspicuously at work, and
instil into his young heart a deep and tender love for the beautiful life
around him. Thus he couples the impressive spectacle of the holy night,
revealed in the shining of the eternal stars, with the supreme object of
emotion, the moral law within the heart, as the most awful of realities.

But not only for Nature in her sublimer aspects did he conceive so
reverential a feeling, the humbler exhibitions of beauty and wisdom were
equally moving to his awakened spirit. Once he told his friends, whom he
constantly had with him at his dinner-table, he had held a swallow in his
hands and gazed into its eyes; "and as I gazed," he said, "it was as if I
had seen heaven". The great lesson of Mind in Nature he had learnt well
at his mother's knee, and he never forgot it. Children, so recently come
out from one eternity, their souls so well attuned to the wonderment and
mystery there lies hid in things, are peculiarly susceptible to such
beautiful influences. Nature is the temple in which their tender souls
should learn their first lessons in worship and see the earliest glimpses
of the Divine.

Kant lived into his eightieth year, surrounded by the homage of Europe,
which made him, in a sense, the keeper of its conscience.