This book shows the fatal result of the renunciation of the Church system of belief. The subject of the tale simply experiences moral annihilation; but the object of his affection, whose mind he had been the means of unsettling in her faith, burst through the boundaries which humanity has placed, and the moral order of the world imposes: they perish both,—each at odds with self, with God, and with human society: only for him there yet remains room for further development. Then the curtain falls,—that is right, according to artistic rule of composition; true and necessary according to the views of those who hold the faith of the Church of England; and from a theological point of view, no other solution could be expected from the book than that which it has given. But here the author has disclosed the inward disease, the fearful hollowness, the spiritual death, of the nation’s philosophical and theological forms, with resistless eloquence; and like the Jews of old, they will exclaim, “That man is a criminal! stone him!” I wish you could let him know how deeply I feel for him, without ever having seen him; and how I desire to admonish him to accept and endure this fatality, as, in the nature of things, he must surely have anticipated it; and as he has pointed out and defended the freedom of the spirit, so must he now (and I believe he will) show in himself, and make manifest to the world, the courage, active in deed, cheerful in power, of that free spirit. It is presumptuous to intrude into the fate and mystery of life in the case of any man, and more especially of a man so remarkable; but the consciousness of community of spirits, of knowing, and endeavoring after what is morally good, and true, and perfect, and of the yearning after every real disciple of the inner religion of Christians, impels me to suggest to you to tell him from me, that I believe the spasm of his spiritual efforts would sooner be calmed, and the solution of the great problem would sooner be found, if he were to live for a time among _us_; I mean, if he resided for a time in one of the German universities. We Germans have been for seventy years working as thinkers, inquirers, poets, seers, also as men of action, to pull down the old and to erect the new Zion; each great man with us has contributed his materials towards the sanctuary, invisible, but firmly fixed in German hearts; the whole nation has neglected and sacrificed political, individual existence and common freedom—to pursue in faith the search after truth. From us something may be learnt, by every spirit of this age. He will experience how truly the divine Plato spoke, when he said, “Seven years of silent inquiry were needful for a man to learn the truth, but fourteen in order to learn how to make it known to his fellow-men.”