an atmosphere of peace breathed upon him. He perceived the supreme moral
prominence of certain Christian ideas, especially that of the atonement
as he interpreted it. 'It is altogether strange to me,' he writes to
Jacobi, 'that I, an old heathen, should see the cross planted in my own
garden, and hear Christ's blood preached without its offending me.'

Goethe's quarrel with Christianity was due to two causes. In the first
place, it was due to his viewing Christianity as mainly, if not
exclusively, a religion of the other world, as it has been called, a
religion whose God is not the principle of all life and nature and for
which nature and life are not divine. In the second place, it was due to
the prominence of the negative or ascetic element in Christianity as
commonly presented, to the fact that in that presentation the law of
self-sacrifice bore no relation to the law of self-realisation. In both
of these respects he would have found himself much more at home with the
apprehension of Christianity which we have inherited from the nineteenth
century. The programme of charity which he outlines in the _Wanderjahre_
as a substitute for religion would be taken to-day, so far as it goes,
as a rather moderate expression of the very spirit of the Christian
religion.




CHAPTER II

IDEALISTIC PHILOSOPHY


The causes which we have named, religious and æsthetic, as well as