his “_Nathan_” only Judaism and Mohammedanism are represented by truly noble and ideal characters, while the chief representative of Christianity is a gloomy zealot, and the conclusion of the parable is that all three rings are counterfeit. In another work he views revelation as one of the stages in “The Education of the Human Race,” which loses its significance as soon as its purpose is served. In familiar conversation with Jacobi he frankly declared his acceptance of the doctrine of Spinoza: Ἓν καὶ πᾶν.[522] =Wieland=, A.D. 1733-1813, soon turned from his youthful zeal for ecclesiastical orthodoxy to the popular philosophy of the cultured man of the world. =Herder=, A.D. 1744-1803, with his enthusiastic appreciation of the poetical contents of the Bible, especially of the Old Testament, was not slow to point out the insipidity of its ordinary treatment. =Goethe=, A.D. 1749-1832, profoundly hated the vandalism of neology, delighted in “The Confessions of a Fair Soul” (§ 172, 2), had in earlier years sympathy with the Herrnhuters, but in the full intellectual vigour of his manhood thought he had no need of Christianity, which offended him by its demand for renunciation of self and the world. =Schiller=, A.D. 1759-1805, enthusiastically admiring everything noble, beautiful and good, misunderstood Christianity, and introduced into the hearts of the German people Kantian rationalism clothed in rich poetic garb. His lament on the downfall of the gods of Greece, even if not so intended by the poet himself, told not so much against orthodox Christianity as against poverty-stricken deism, which banished the God of Christianity from the world and set in his place the dead forces of nature. And if indeed he really thought that for religion’s sake he should confess to no religion, he has certainly in many profoundly Christian utterances given unconscious testimony to Christianity.--The Jacobi philosophy of feeling found poetic interpreters in =Jean Paul Richter=, A.D. 1763-1825, and =Hebel=, died A.D. 1826, in whom we find the same combination of pious sentiment which is drawn toward Christianity and the sceptical understanding which allied itself to the revolt against the common orthodoxy. =J. H. Voss=, a rough, powerful Dutch peasant, who in his “_Luise_” sketched the ideal of a brave rationalistic country parson, and, with the inexorable rigour of an inquisitor, hunted down the night birds of ignorance and oppression. But alongside of those children of the world stood two genuine sons of Luther, =Matthias Claudius=, A.D. 1740-1815, and =J. G. Hamann=, A.D. 1730-1788, the “Magus of the North” and the Elijah of his age, of whom Jean Paul said that his commas were planetary systems and his periods solar systems, to whom the philosopher Hemsterhuis erected in the garden of Princess Gallitzin a tablet with the inscription: