Kantianism, to which he at first adhered, into an idealistic science of knowledge, in which only the _ego_ that posits itself appears as real, and the _non-ego_, only by its being posited by the _ego_; and thus the world and nature are only a reflex of the mind. But when, accused of atheism in A.D. 1798, he was expelled from his position in Jena, he changed his views, rushing from the verge of atheism into a mysticism approaching to Christianity. In his “Guide to a Blessed Life,” A.D. 1806, he delivered religion from being a mere servant to morals, and sought the blessedness of life in the loving surrender of one’s whole being to the universal Spirit, the full expression of which he found in John’s Gospel. Pauline Christianity, on the other hand, with its doctrine of sin and redemption, seemed to him a deterioration, and Christ Himself only the most complete representative of the incarnation of God repeated in all ages and in every pious man.--In the closing years of the century, =Schelling= brought forward his theory of _identity_, which was one of the most powerful instruments in introducing a new era.[521] § 171.11. =The German National Literature.=--When the powerful strain of the evangelical church hymn had well-nigh expired in the feeble lispings of =Gellert’s= sacred poetry, =Klopstock= began to chant the praises of the Messiah in a higher strain. But the pathos of his odes met with no response, and his “Messiah,” of which the first three cantos appeared in A.D. 1748, though received with unexampled enthusiasm, could do nothing to exorcise the spirit of unbelief, and was more praised than read. The theological standpoint of =Lessing=, A.D. 1729-1781, is set forth in one of his letters to his brother. “I despise the orthodox even more than you do, only I despise the clergy of the new style even more. What is the new-fashioned theology of those shallow pates compared with orthodoxy but as dung-water compared with dirty water? On this point we are at one, that our old religious system is false; but I cannot say with you that it is a patchwork of bunglers and half philosophers. I know nothing in the world upon which human ingenuity has been more subtly exercised than upon it. That religious system which is now offered in place of the old is a patchwork of bunglers and half philosophers.” He is offended at men hanging the concerns of eternity on the spider’s thread of external evidences, and so he was delighted to hurl the Wolfenbüttel “Fragments” at the heads of theologians and the Hamburg pastor Goeze, whom he loaded with contumely and scorn. Thoroughly characteristic too is the saying in the “_Duplik_:” That if God holding in his right hand all truth, and in his left hand the search after truth, subject to error through all eternity, were to offer him his choice, he would humbly say, “Father the left, for pure truth is indeed for thee alone.” In