He must feel as young Goethe felt when he first peered into the
melancholy atheistic twilight of the Système de la Nature; to him this
book seemed so grey, so Cimmerian and deadly, that he could only
endure its presence with difficulty, and shuddered at it as one
shudders at a spectre.

VIII.

We ought now to be sufficiently informed concerning the heaven and the
courage of our new believer to be able to turn to the last question:
How does he write his books? and of what order are his religious
documents?

He who can answer this question uprightly and without prejudice will
be confronted by yet another serious problem, and that is: How this
Straussian pocket-oracle of the German Philistine was able to pass
through six editions? And he will grow more than ever suspicious when
he hears that it was actually welcomed as a pocket-oracle, not only in
scholastic circles, but even in German universities as well. Students
are said to have greeted it as a canon for strong intellects, and,
from all accounts, the professors raised no objections to this view;
while here and there people have declared it to be a religions book
for scholars. Strauss himself gave out that he did not intend his
profession of faith to be merely a reference-book for learned and
cultured people; but here let us abide by the fact that it was first
and foremost a work appealing to his colleagues, and was ostensibly a
mirror in which they were to see their own way of living faithfully
reflected. For therein lay the feat. The Master feigned to have
presented us with a new ideal conception of the universe, and now
adulation is being paid him out of every mouth; because each is in a