The charge of atheism which still continues to be levelled against our pantheism, and against the monism which lies at its root, no longer finds a response among the really educated classes of the present day. It is true that not so very long ago the German Imperial Chancellor, in the Prussian Chamber of Deputies, found it in him to put forward such an alternative as this: "Either the Christian or the atheistic view of the world"; this in the defence of a most objectionable law, designed to hand over our school training, tied hand and foot, to the papal hierarchy. The vast distance which separates the last-named degenerate outgrowth of the Christian religion from pure primitive Christianity is not greater than that which separates those mediaeval alternatives from the cultured religious consciousness of the present day. To one who regards as true exercises of Christian religion the adoration of old clothes and wax dolls, or the thoughtless repetition of masses or rosaries, who believes in wonder-working relics, and purchases pardon for his sins by means of indulgence-money or Peter's pence, we willingly concede the claim to possess the "only saving religion"; but with such fetish-worshippers we will willingly submit to be ranked as "atheists." In like case with the charge of atheism and irreligion are those so often heard against monism, that it destroys the poetry of life and fails to satisfy the spiritual wants of human nature; we are told, in particular, that aesthetics--certainly a most important department both in theoretical philosophy and in practical life--is prejudiced by a monistic philosophy. But David Friedrich Strauss, one of our subtlest exponents of aesthetics and also one of our noblest writers, has already refuted such a charge; and shown how, on the contrary, the care for poetry and the cultivation of the beautiful are in the "new faith" called upon to play a still greater part than ever. My present hearers, at once investigators and lovers of nature, do not need to be told that every new insight which we obtain into the secrets of nature at the same time also kindles our souls, affords new material for imagination to work on, and enlarges our perception of the beautiful. To convince ourselves how closely all these noblest spiritual activities of man hang together, how intimately the knowledge of truth is bound up with the love of goodness and veneration of the beautiful, it will be enough to mention a single name, Germany's greatest genius--Wolfgang Goethe.