For Heine arose early in active rebellion against a merely passive classicism; just as fiercer and more ardent cries, as from the Orient, pierce through the songs of Catullus. The mischievous Hermes was irritated by the calm and quiet activities of the aged Zeus of Weimar. And then the earnest Hebrew nature within him, liberated by Hegel's favourite thought of the divinity of man, came into play with its large revolutionary thirsts. Thus it was that he appeared before the world as the most brilliant leader of a movement of national or even world-wide emancipation. The greater part of his prose works, from the youthful _Reisebilder_ onwards, and a considerable portion of his poetic work, record the energy with which he played this part. But whether the Greek or the Hebrew element happened to be most active in Heine, the ideal that he set up for life generally was the equal activity of both sides--in other words, the harmony of flesh and spirit. It is this thought which dominates _The History of Religion and Philosophy in Germany_, his finest achievement in this kind. That book was written at the moment when Heine touched the highest point of his enthusiasm for freedom and his faith in the possibility of human progress. It is a sort of programme for the immediate future of the human spirit, in the form of a brief and bold outline of the spiritual history of Germany and Germany's great emancipators, Luther, Lessing, Kant, and the rest. It sets forth in a fresh and fascinating shape that Everlasting Gospel which, from the time of Joachim of Flora downwards, has always gleamed in dreams before the minds of men as the successor of Christianity. Heine's vision of a democracy of cakes and ale, founded on the heights of religious, philosophical, and political freedom, still spurs and thrills us--even now-a-days, when we have wearied of stately bills of fare for a sulky humanity that will not feed at our bidding, no, not on cakes and ale. Heine is wise enough to see, however imperfectly, that it is unreasonable to expect the speedy erection of any New Jerusalem; for, as he expresses it in his own way, the holy vampires of the middle ages have sucked away so much of our life-blood that the world has become a hospital. A sudden revolution of fever-stricken or hysterical invalids can effect little of permanent value; only a long and invigorating course of the tonics of life can make free from danger the open-air of nature. "Our first duty," he asserted in this book, "is to become healthy."