It was indeed a period when many thought that the old sound, even impregnable, position of Christianity had been not only undermined but overthrown. Strauss, for example, honestly believed that he had entirely destroyed the historical credibility of the four Gospels. The Princess herself came to Germany at a moment when the Tübingen schools were the intellectual leaders, and Strauss was their prophet, and the training which she had undergone under the superintendence of her father had prepared her to sympathise rather with the attack than with the defence. It is easy now to see that orthodoxy was not then very fortunate in its champions, and that the overwhelming weight of the scholarship and intellectual strength of the time belonged to the advanced thinkers. Moreover, it must be remembered that much of the religion of that day was mere lip-service, a conventional orthodoxy which, while it resisted investigation and inquiry on the one hand, failed to bear practical fruit in conduct and life. Only a few months after the Princess had arrived in Prussia as a bride, the then Prince Regent, her father-in-law, made a speech which attracted great attention, not only in Germany but in Europe generally. In it he said it could not be denied that in the Lutheran Church, the established church of Prussia, an orthodoxy had grown up which was not consistent with the basic principles of the church, and the church, in consequence, had dissemblers among its adherents. All hypocrisy, the Prince continued--and he defined hypocrisy as ecclesiastical matters which are utilised for selfish purposes--ought to be exposed wherever possible. It was in the whole conduct of the individual that real religion was exhibited, and that must always be distinguished from external religious appearance and show. When such language could be used from the very steps of the throne, it may be imagined how great was the intellectual ferment in which everyone who thought and read at all was necessarily involved. Naturally the eager, impulsive Princess, with the intellectual courage and sincerity which her father had implanted in her, could not stand aloof. But if, at this time of her life, she seemed to abandon the old orthodox positions, it is not less true to say, that, while paying the penalty at the time in unhappiness and spiritual disquiet, she ultimately reaped the reward of an even firmer faith. She came to see, indeed, that the deepest religious convictions are not the fruit of philosophical speculation or of textual criticism, but of experience.