"I can perfectly understand your sense of uneasiness, and I sympathize with you. It requires a degree of self-renunciation that cannot be expected, and in my view should never be demanded, of men with proud natures, men of intellect and spirit, men of marked individuality, to suffer what is put upon the Jews. Yet such is the situation, and whether it is justified or not, is a point upon which at this time I do not care to express an opinion. You know how truly devoted I always have been and still am to you. I have never had a better friend, a dearer companion than you. Our friendship was secured by our agreement on the philosophic questions that used to occupy us, by the similarity of our views in regard to things in general, and by our wholly concordant attitude toward the various problems of social life. I need give you no further assurances in regard to that; and whether I separate the personal from the more general view, I am unable to say. "Ever since you wrote that the Jewish question occupies you to the exclusion of all else, I have been concerning myself with it. In fact it is an insistent issue. It forces itself upon me in my profession, in the world in which I live. You know that I am devoted, body and soul, to my priestly calling, and my attachment grows stronger the more I steep myself in the spirit of the Protestant doctrine. How it is to be deplored that the best among you cannot partake of its blessings; for whoever has had the fortune to call you friend, knows how to value you; and I am just enough to recognize that there must be many other Jews like yourself. But whether it is that you cannot, or that we do not wish it, the result remains the same; and this result cannot be gainsaid. A few days ago, I came across an expression of Feuerbach's, which perhaps gives an explanation of the reproach, often brought against the Jew, of pushing aggressiveness. 'To do away with the meaninglessness of our individual existence,' he says, 'is the purpose of our lives, the motive of our enterprises, the source of our virtues as of our faults and shortcomings. Man has and should have the desire to be individual. He properly desires to attain significance, to achieve a qualitative value. As a mere individual, he is lost like a single drop of water, indistinguishable in the wearisome stream of a meaningless aggregate. If a person loses the interests that express his individuality, if he becomes conscious of the insignificance of his bare personality, he loses the distinction between existence and non-existence, life becomes loathsome, and he ends it in suicide; that is, he annihilates his non-entity. It is natural that this striving for individual distinction comes out most clearly in a class of society socially subordinated, as a foreign race or a religious sect, subject to the persecution of the majority. Everybody wishes to stand for something; and to this end grasps at the best means to secure position or distinction in the domain