He had said all this with great unction. The Count was silent a moment, before he said: "Our table-talk has assumed so serious a turn and so grave an import, that it would certainly be more proper to break off, and either to reserve these explanations for a calmer hour, or wholly drop them, since on these important subjects one is most easily misunderstood." "Because you now feel yourself completely defeated," said the Baron, "you wish at all events to provide yourself with a safe retreat. I should have thought it now became your duty, openly to confess, that you have nothing to say on this point, unless you would undisguisedly avow, that the almost forgotten scepticism of former times is dearer to you than our holy religion." "O speak!" cried Dorothea, forgetting herself. "You see how pressingly you are called upon," said the mother, darting a long and threatening look at Dorothea. Alfred too requested the Count to explain how far he coincided with the opinions of the age on this point. "As I cannot entirely avoid it," said he, "I will briefly hint what I have been able to observe; for as I have been now a year again in Germany, every thing is not so strange to me as you suppose, though it is but a short time back that I came to revisit my birthplace here. I only wish I could divest you all of the prejudice with which, I observe, you consider me, as a profane infidel. No, that is really not my character; but I must reserve to myself the incontestable right of being a Christian after my own manner. That there are now, as at all times, really pious and enlightened spirits, and that these deserve our respect, who would doubt? The need of faith has again proclaimed itself, the spirit has knocked at almost every heart, and admonitions have been heard, of various kinds, and from all quarters. A clear fresh stream has once more poured from the eternal hills along the thirsty plain, and the things and beings overtaken by it follow the force of its waves: all feel irresistibly hurried along, and great and small, strong and weak, are forced down with its current. Genuine as is the enthusiasm which this has occasioned, yet has it happened here, as in all historical events, that this phenomenon likewise has been clouded by the multitude, by vanity and human weakness, and as it was once the fashion to play the freethinker and the _esprit fort_, though many were weak and superstitious, so it has now become the custom to seem religious, though many are frivolous and lukewarm enough at heart." "_Desinit in atrum piscem_," said the Baron warmly, "your beginning promised something better."