In the arranging of their relations, none of their intimates helped Friedrich and Dorothea more than their clerical friend, Schleiermacher. On none of Schlegel's friends had _Lucinde_ had such a powerful effect. Schleiermacher was at this time chaplain of the Charité Church in Berlin. He had long followed Friedrich's emancipatory endeavours with warm sympathy, and even admiration. In his essay _On Diotima_, as well as in his harsh criticism of Schiller's _Würde der Frauen_, Friedrich had attacked the traditional conception of woman's position in society. He had held up to contempt the ordinary marriage, in which the wedded pair "live together with a feeling of mutual contempt, he seeing in her only her sex, she in him his social position, and both in their children their own production and property." What he desired was the moral and intellectual emancipation of women. Intellect and culture, combined with enthusiasm, were the qualities which in his eyes made a woman lovable. The ordinary ideal of womanliness he scorned. He writes with bitterness of the stupidity and criminality of the men who demand ignorance and innocence in women, thereby compelling them to be prudish. Prudery is false pretence of innocence. True innocence in woman he maintains to be perfectly compatible with intellectual culture. It exists wherever there is religion, i.e. capacity for enthusiasm. The idea that noble, enlightened free-thought is less becoming in the case of women than of men is only one of the many generally accepted platitudes set in circulation by Rousseau. "The thraldom of woman" is one of the curses of humanity. His highest desire as an author was, as he naively puts it, "to found a system of morality" (eine Moral zu stiften). He calls opposition to positive law and conventional ideas of right, "the first moral impulse" felt by man. In his _Vernunftkatechismus für edle Frauen_ ("Catechism of Reason for Noble-minded Women"), a fragment which appeared in the _Athenæum_, Schleiermacher writes in exactly the same strain, calling upon women to free themselves from the bonds of their sex. Nay, incredible as it may sound, it is quite possible (as Haym has proved) that the frequently quoted saying of Friedrich Schlegel, that there is nothing of serious importance to be urged against a _marriage à quatre_, really emanated from Schleiermacher. It is levelled at the many degrading and unreal marriages, at the "unsuccessful attempts at marriage," which the State in its foolishness makes binding, and which prevent the possibility of a true marriage. The writer of the fragment in which the saying occurs observes that most marriages are only preparatory and distant approximations to the true marriage; and Schleiermacher, in his Letters, writes that many attempts are necessary, and that "if four or five couples were taken together, really good marriages might result, provided they were allowed to exchange."