All that he rescues for himself from the shipwreck of positive religion is the person and life-story of Jesus--that beautiful divine-human personal life which is to him an equivalent for the citizen-life of the ancient world. But his Jesus is not Jesus pure and simple, but a Jesus-Apollo such as Heine describes in his poem _Frieden_--the giant, who bears the red, flaming sun in his breast for a heart. We have a similar fusion of heathenism and Christianity in the well-known preface to _Romancero_, where Heine talks of his last genuflection "before the ever blessed goddess of beauty, our dear lady of Milo." For this is not Venus pure and simple, but Venus-Madonna. Thus Hegel himself is the originator of that pagan Hellenism, of which it was the fashion to accuse Young Germany. And in his philosophy we can even detect the spirit which might evolve such a watchword as "the emancipation of the flesh." This was a French expression introduced by Heine into German literature, which was eagerly taken up by his admirers and imitators, and was specially execrated by the enemies and denouncers of the new literature. It certainly might be suspected of an immoral meaning in Heine's mouth and of an ugly meaning in Heinrich Laube's; but amongst the best of the men of the young generation it meant nothing but what Goethe and Hegel, too, had in reality desired. Karl Gutzkow has insisted, and with reason, that only a low mind coupled with this expression ideas of licence for all bad passions. For the word flesh in itself conveyed no objectionable meaning. The New Testament says: "The Word was made flesh." Flesh, in the Christian acceptation of the word, means the natural, the unbaptised, the original man. Its emancipation in reality meant to the young enthusiasts of the day nothing more than the restoring of her rights to nature, war against what is contrary to nature. What they desired was to make the laws of nature the rule of conduct, to release nature from interdict and ban.[3] A neo-Hellenism realised in the Hegelian spirit was what was present to their minds. It did not seem a matter of great consequence to them that Hegel should end his days as a rigid Prussian Conservative, or that his _Philosophy of Right_ should recognise all existing institutions as "holy things," and make out the highest ethical conceptions to be "idols." He had underestimated the strength of the scientific doubt of the day. How many institutions still presented themselves as objects of veneration and faith to the normal mind of the period? Four at most--the monarchy, the church, marriage, and property. As regards these, Hegel's doctrine is as follows: