In the end, however, what made the success of the book was not its popular characteristics, whether good or bad, but the enmity which it drew down upon the author. The Basle Privat‐Docent who, in his work of 1839, had congratulated the Zurichers on having rejected Strauss, now, as Professor and Director of the Seminary at Heidelberg, came very near being adjudged worthy of the martyr’s crown himself. He had been at Heidelberg since 1851, after holding for a short time De Wette’s chair at Basle. At his first coming a mildly reactionary theology might have claimed him as its own. He gave it a right to do so by the way in which he worked against the philosopher, Kuno Fischer, in the Higher Consistory. But in the struggles over the constitution of the Church he changed his position. As a defender of the rights of the laity he ranged himself on the more liberal side. After his great victory in the General Synod of 1861, in which the new constitution of the Church was established, he called a German Protestant assembly at Frankfort, in order to set on foot a general movement for Church reform. This assembly met in 1863, and led to the formation of the Protestant Association. When the _Charakterbild Jesu_ appeared, friend and foe were alike surprised at the thoroughness with which Schenkel advocated the more liberal views. “Schenkel’s book,” complained Luthardt, in a lecture at Leipzig,(137) “has aroused a painful interest. We had learnt to know him in many aspects; we were not prepared for such an apostasy from his own past. How long is it since he brought about the dismissal of Kuno Fischer from Heidelberg because he saw in the pantheism of this philosopher a danger to Church and State? It is still fresh in our memory that it was he who in the year 1852 drew up the report of the Theological Faculty of Heidelberg upon the ecclesiastical controversy raised by Pastor Dülon at Bremen, in which he denied Dülon’s Christianity on the ground that he had assailed the doctrines of original sin, of justification by faith, of a living and personal God, of the eternal Divine Sonship of Christ, of the Kingdom of God, and of the credibility of the holy Scriptures.” And now this same Schenkel was misusing the Life of Jesus as a weapon in “party polemics”!