The Protestant Church understood this as well as the Catholic, perhaps better. Strict puritanism elevated spiritual discipline to the highest moral law, which ruled life with unrelenting and inexorable despotism. Marriage and the family, not love, must be the aim of man; and poor Gretchen, who gave herself to Faust without observing the established ceremonial, was forced to consider herself eternally damned. The inward discipline still more than the outward guarded the foundations and gave strength and force to the State as well as to the people. Men and women were not spared; they were not even taken into account. Hundreds and thousands of Gretchens, men and women, were sacrificed, and are being sacrificed still, without pity to 'the highest spiritual interests.' Acknowledgment and respect for the prescribed order had become so deeply rooted in the German soul--I speak of Germany, because no other nation upon earth is so highly disciplined--that even the most independent characters yielded to it. The most dreadful sin is not the breaking of the law--a violation which like Gretchen's can be explained by weakness and weakness alone, though it was not forgiven, was less severely condemned--but rebellion against the law, the open and daring refusal to obey, even though it be expressed in the most insignificant act. Therefore every one tends to show his loyalty from that side first of all. In a greater or less degree all have transgressed the law, but the more one has violated it in act, the more imperative he considers its glorification in words. And this order of things aroused neither suspicion nor discontent. Therein could be seen acknowledged the superiority of spirit over body, of mind over passion. Nobody ever asked the question: 'Is it really true that the spirit must have the mastery over the body, and the mind over the passions?' And when Heine allowed himself to put the question and to answer it in his own way, the whole force of German indignation burst upon him. First of all they suspected his sincerity and truthfulness. 'It is impossible,' said the pious, 'that he really should not acknowledge the law. He is only pretending.' Such a supposition was the more natural because the ring of conviction was not always to be heard in Heine's tone: one of his poems ends with the following words: 'I seek the body, the body, the young and tender body. The soul you may bury deep in the ground--I myself have soul enough.' The poem is daring and provocative in the extreme, but in it, as in all Heine's daring and provocative poems, may be heard a sharp and nervous laugh, which must be understood as the expression of the divided soul, as a mockery of himself. It is he who tells of his meeting with two women, mother and daughter. Both please him: the mother by her much knowledge, the daughter by her innocence. And the poet stands between them, in his own words, like Buridan's ass between two bundles of hay. Again, daring, again, the laugh; and