Even from this sketch of its origin, the fact emerges that the "Kulturkampf" mood of those years had little or nothing to do with this little work, as was readily acknowledged, even by the Liberal Catholics Kuernberger and Scherer. Keller had absolutely no intention of caricaturing the Catholic adoration of saints, like Wilhelm Busch, for example, in his "St. Antony" (1870). On the contrary, when sometimes he turns the faces of the figures of the Church Legends "to another quarter of the heavens than that towards which they looked in their extant forms," this positive confession is the important thing to his mind; for the great Swiss writer has no more intention of denying a paedagogic purpose here than anywhere else in his epic work. Gottfried Keller, like his friends Storm and Heyse, regarded asceticism as a tendency detrimental to the healthy development of humanity. And with this conviction he accordingly devoted himself to the conversion of the converted. Like his Naughty Saint Vitalis, he makes a point of seeking out the most difficult cases, self-sacrificing devotion even unto death: Eugenia who flees from worldly success into the rigorous quiet of the cloister, Vitalis who, in glad self-humiliation, accepts the disgrace of evil repute, are safely piloted by him into the everyday contentment of happy wedlock. For this is the author's meaning, that on this very account they become the more worthy of our honour. Just as he relates how a beautiful ancient statue of the goddess Juno was fitted with a golden nimbus and set up as an image of Mary, so he himself now endeavours to take the nimbus off again, that the pure marble beauty of simple humanity may be restored once more. It cannot be denied that his unflinching adherence to this point of view is not maintained without poking a good deal of fun at piety and asceticism, but it is always good-tempered and likeable. After all, the principal thing is the edifying admonition: Arise! Arise! Shake free thyself From dumpish, idle sorrow.