At the time when the style of these two books was created the greatest representative of European literature of that period, St. Augustine, appeared and gave to Christian humanity the best book of its time, the _Confessiones_. The _Confessiones_ is a striking book powerfully written. Its style is both soft and forceful; because of that it became one of the best books of the Church. Wherein, however, lies the secret of that book? What made it a success? It is the attempt to imitate the Bible, just as Nietzsche's _Zarathustra_ took up the style of the Bible and became the best-known book of the nineteenth century. But how does St. Augustine's _Confessiones_ compare with the Bible? In certain places it is an artificial imitation of the Bible, pure and simple, or, to be more accurate, a poor imitation of the Psalms; only very rarely does Augustine reach the height of the true Biblical style. Because St. Augustine succeeded in imitating the style of the book which we created he became the literary master-mind of Europe of his time. The entire literature of confessions from Augustine to Rousseau and from Rousseau to Tolstoy has its inspiration in the Bible; as long as humanity will produce poets who think in terms of eternity and who feel at one with the cosmos they will have to fall back on the Bible, as did Dante and Shakespeare, Milton, Goethe and Nietzsche. Just as our national book, the Bible, became the inexhaustible source of inspiration to the great representatives of world literature, just so have many books written by Jews within the last five hundred years influenced and affected the European mind. The books of Spinoza in the seventeenth, of Mendelssohn in the eighteenth, of Heinrich Heine and Karl Marx in the nineteenth and those of Bergson in the twentieth century were all cornerstones in the realm of the literature of modern times. Only recently has attention been called by the admirers of Spinoza to the exquisite and truly artistic style of the lonely Jew of Amsterdam. Mendelssohn was certainly not a first-rate philosopher, but he is considered by his admirers and opponents alike a first-rate writer and literary master-mind; next to Lessing he was the greatest German stylist of his time. The deep impression that Karl Marx made on his contemporaries we understand less by reading his minor writings. As an economist of genius he could appeal to a small community of scholars, but as a literary man of rare qualities, as a powerful writer who wrote with blood and venom, he succeeded in greatly infuriating his opponents and enthusing his adherents.