enlisted public opinion in their cause, and who mutually defend each
other in this belief? What purpose can it serve when one individual
openly declares war against Strauss, seeing that a crowd have decided
in his favour, and that the masses led by this crowd have learned to
ask six consecutive times for the Master's Philistine
sleeping-mixture?

If, without further ado, we here assumed that the Straussian
confession-book had triumphed over public opinion and had been
acclaimed and welcomed as conqueror, its author might call our
attention to the fact that the multitudinous criticisms of his work in
the various public organs are not of an altogether unanimous or even
favourable character, and that he therefore felt it incumbent upon him
to defend himself against some of the more malicious, impudent, and
provoking of these newspaper pugilists by means of a postscript. How
can there be a public opinion concerning my book, he cries to us, if
every journalist is to regard me as an outlaw, and to mishandle me as
much as he likes? This contradiction is easily explained, as soon as
one considers the two aspects of the Straussian book--the theological
and the literary, and it is only the latter that has anything to do
with German culture. Thanks to its theological colouring, it stands
beyond the pale of our German culture, and provokes the animosity of
the various theological groups--yea, even of every individual German,
in so far as he is a theological sectarian from birth, and only
invents his own peculiar private belief in order to be able to dissent
from every other form of belief. But when the question arises of
talking about Strauss THE WRITER, pray listen to what the theological
sectarians have to say about him. As soon as his literary side comes
under notice, all theological objections immediately subside, and the
dictum comes plain and clear, as if from the lips of one congregation: