But he is not content with a purely philosophic system of morals, he aims at the preservation of religion, and in especial of the Christian religion; and to that end he brings forward a new method of interpretation, the literary and æsthetic method, the purpose of which is to glean from the sacred texts whatever they may contain of moral beauty, in the hope that it may incidentally prove to contain also what is true. It aims at reconstructing the primitive notions of Christianity, in whatsoever they possessed of vagueness, of indecision, and at the same time of profundity, and to set them in opposition over against the gross precision of popular views. In matters of metaphysic or religion there is nothing more absurd than an excessive precision; the truth in such matters is not to be rounded in an epigram. Epigram can at best serve, not as a definition, but as a suggestion of the infinities that it really does not circumscribe. And just as the verity in such matters overpasses the measure of language, so it overpasses the personalities and the figures which humanity has chosen as representative of it. When an idea is powerfully conceived, it tends to become definite, to take unto itself a visage, a voice; our ears seem to hear and our eyes to see what our hearts feel. “Man never knows,” said Goethe, “how anthropomorphic he is.” What is there so surprising in the fact that humanity has personified that which in all climes claimed its allegiance—the idea of goodness and of justice? The Eternal, the eternally Just, the Omnipotent who squares reality with justice, He who parcels out evil and good, the Being who weighs all actions, who does all things by weight and measure, or rather who is Himself weight and measure—_that_ is the God of the Jewish people, the Javeh of adult Judaism, as He ultimately appears in the mist of the unknown. In our days He has become transmuted into a simple moral conception, which, having forcibly taken possession of the human mind, has at last clothed itself in a mystical form—has become personified by alliance with a crowd of superstitions that the “false science of theologians” regards as inseparable from it and from which a more delicately discriminating interpretation—an interpretation more _literary_ and less _literal_—should set it free. God having become one with the moral law, a further step may be taken; one may regard Christ who immolated Himself to save the world as a moral symbol of self-sacrifice, as the sublime type in which we find united all the suffering of human life and all the ideal grandeur of morality. In His figure the human and the divine are reconciled. He was a man, for He suffered, but His devotion was so great that He was a god. And what then is that Heaven which is reserved for those who follow Christ and walk in the path of self-sacrifice? It is moral perfection. Hell is the symbol of that depth of corruption to which, by hypothesis, they will