We know what Mozart’s heart-felt religious feeling was. He disclosed it in the frankest way whenever a proper occasion offered. He was just as honestly attached to his Church. When he was starting on his great Parisian journey, in the interest of his art, his father wrote him: “May the grace of God attend you everywhere, may it never forsake you, and it never will forsake you, if you are industrious to fulfill the duties of a really good Catholic.” But at this time, the necessity of examining the great questions of life, death and immortality, and of disclosing to each other, in earnest conversation, the questions of the soul, was very generally felt, by people even outside the Church. And this all the more, because neither the Protestant nor the Catholic service seemed able to satisfy the spiritual cravings of the educated. The Protestant Church was divided into the opposing parties of orthodoxy and rationalism. The Catholic Church had grown torpid, stereotyped in dogma, and its worship had sunk almost to the level of mere theatrical mummery. Oneness of spirit soon led to leagues or unions and orders of which the order of Free Masons attained the greatest importance. Of the men who constantly bore in mind the intellectual life and elevation of the German people, Lessing, Wieland, Herder and Goethe belonged to this order. And since it was its aim to realize the highest virtues of Christianity, the purification of the mind and heart by the sacrifice of self, and the assistance of all men, it was impossible that a man like Mozart should not have felt drawn to it. He joined the order in Vienna, and so true did the doctrine of the sanctifying nature of death as the real “object and aim of life,” and as the symbol of the self-sacrifice we should be ever ready to make of ourselves, seem to him that he did not rest until he had induced his father to join it also. They, indeed, destroyed the correspondence with one another, on this subject. But the _Magic Flute_ bears witness to the earnestness with which Mozart held to these sublime truths of Christianity, even outside the Church. Its history is as follows: