In his Parisian diary, which was intended for himself alone, he tells of the fall of a platform on the occasion of a public festival. A boy, who was a stranger to him, was injured by it; he took him in his carriage, and subsequently wrote: “I held him afterwards for a long time in my arms, so that at least he should see something of the unveiling of the statue.” On the 25th of July, 1834, he wrote in the same journal: “A disagreeable and entirely unfounded slander will perhaps put an end to my Egyptian project,” and immediately afterwards: “Heap coals of fire on the head of thy enemy.” This is what we call “kind-hearted,” this is christian in the right sense of the word. He had absolute control of the property and never restricted the beneficence of his wife, half of whose life was devoted to the care of the poor and the like occupations. Even such sums as five hundred thalers he willingly gave away when it was a question of saving a poor family. Just as he visited me as a teacher, and gave me a portion of his precious time, when a protracted illness prevented my going out of the house, so did he seek out in the hospital a needy scholar as soon as he heard of his severe illness, and there extend to him the most cordial assistance, though the young man had never been personally intimate with him, and had not been, like me, recommended to him by a Grimm. And how many such things, which never came to my knowledge, could be told of him! Although those who cling to the letter of the faith would not approve his Christianity, yet his life was a truly christian one. He ever made an open confession of faith in God and Christ, he took, whenever he felt the need for it, the holy sacrament, he experienced in himself the blessings which Christianity had brought into the world, he recognized them in history, and he allowed his children to be educated by his pious wife without opposition. He declared to her, to Trumpp, and to others, that the highest duty of human beings was “to love God above all others, and one’s neighbor as oneself.” The new conquests of natural science had no power to shake his faith in God, although he followed them with interest after two of his sons had devoted themselves to such studies. When doubts arose in him he imposed upon his own acute mental powers the task of dissipating them, and an interesting composition was found among his papers, in which he attempts to subvert the two principal propositions in an eloquent masterpiece of Bois-Reymond’s[104] which had disturbed his mind.