The former was the better man, but his career brought discredit on private virtue and public morality. In the early part of his life he was blameless, but he subsequently betrayed all the personal weakness which his skepticism tended to engender. We get a fair portrait of him from the pen of one of his countrymen, Kahnis: "What Edelmann wished was nothing new," writes this author; "after the manner of all adherents of Illuminism, he wished to reduce all positive religions to natural religion. The positive heathenish religions stand, to him, on a level with Judaism and Christianity. He is more just toward heathenism than toward Judaism, and more just toward Judaism than toward Christianity. Everything positive in religion is, as such, superstition. Christ was a mere man, whose chief merit consists in the struggle against superstition. What he taught, and what he was anxious for, no one, however, may attempt to learn from the New Testament writings, inasmuch as these were forged as late as the time of Constantine. All which the church teaches of his divinity, of his merits, of the gracious influence of the Holy Spirit, is absurd. There is no rule of truth but reason, and it manifests its truths directly by a peculiar sense. Whatever this sense says is true. It is this sense which perceives the world. The reality of everything which exists is God. In the proper sense there can, therefore, not exist any atheist, because every one who admits the reality of the world admits also the reality of God. God is not a person--least of all are there three persons in God. If God be the substance in all the phenomena, then it follows of itself that God cannot be thought of without the world, and hence that the world has no more had an origin than it will have an end. One may call the world the body of God, the shadow of God, the son of God. The spirit of God is in all that exists. It is ridiculous to ascribe inspiration to special persons only; every one ought to be a Christ, a prophet, an inspired man. The human spirit, being a breath of God, does not perish; our spirit, separated from its body by death, enters into a connection with some other body. Thus Edelmann taught a kind of metempsychosis. What he taught had been thoroughly and ingeniously said in France and England; but from a German theologian, and that with such eloquent coarseness, with such a mastery in expatiating in blasphemy, such things were unheard of. But as yet the faith of the church was a power in Germany!"