The countryman still continued true to his church; there was much praying and psalm-singing in the huts of the poor, frequently a good deal of pious enthusiasm; there were still revivalists and prophets among the country people. In the mountain countries, especially where an active industry had established itself, in the poorest huts, among the wood carvers, weavers, and lacemakers of the Erzgebirger and of the Silesian valleys, a pious, godly feeling was alive. A few years later, when the continental embargo annihilated the industry of the poor, amid hunger and deprivations which often brought them to the point of death, they showed that their faith gave them the power of suffering with resignation. Betwixt the nobility and the mass of the people stood the higher class of citizens: literati, officials, ecclesiastics, great merchants, and tradespeople. They also were divided from the people by a privilege, the importance of which would not be understood in our time,--they were exempt from military service. The severest oppression which fell on the sons of the people, their children were free from. The sons of peasants or artisans who had the capacity for study could do so, but they had first to pass an examination, the so-called "genius test," to exempt them from service in the army. But to the son of a literary man or a merchant it was a disgrace, if, after a learned school education, he sank so low as to fall into the hands of recruiting officers. Even the benevolent Kant refused the request of a scholar for a recommendation, because he had had the meanness to bear his position as a soldier so long and so meekly.[27] In the literary circle there was still an external difference from the citizen in dress and mode of life: it was the best portion of the nation, in possession of the highest culture of the time. It included poets and thinkers, inventive artists and men of learning, all who won any influence in the domain of intellectual life, as leaders and educators, teachers and critics. Many of the nobility who had entered official life, or had higher intellectual tendencies, had joined them. They were sometimes fellow-workers, frequently companions and kindly promoters of ideal interests. In every city there were gentry in this literary set. They were scholars of the great philosopher of Koenigsberg; their souls were filled with the poetic creations of the great poet, with the high results of the knowledge of antiquity. But in their life there was still much sternness and earnestness; the performance of duty was not easy or cheerful. Their conception of existence wavered betwixt ideal requirements and a fastidious, often narrow pedantry, which strikingly distinguished them, not always advantageously, from the nobleman.