And we may hope it will, more commonly than hitherto, be put to the test again, when all other attempts to regain a calm contentment and a cheerful, healthy spirit of labor have suffered wreck, and when a nervous humanity longs for real tranquillity again, and craves some better bulwark against the increasing weariness of existence than a merely materialistic conception of life affords. Then will religion--and without any external compelling Authority, which can never again in any manner be reëstablished--then will religion regain anew its place in the life of the nations; whereas, now, it has often become nothing but a pleasant play upon the feelings of leisurely or (in a worldly sense) happy people, while to such as really need it to deliver them in distress and sorrow, it is, through prejudice, closed. Many of these latter, however, and perhaps at no very distant day, will come to these old water-springs, now all but choked with rubbish; though such an idea is far enough from their thoughts as yet. But, wheresoever they may have tried, nowhere else can they still their thirst for a tranquil philosophy of life. For what the old chronicler said of Israel is true to-day: “The days will arise when there shall be no true God, no law, and no priest to show the way; and in those times there shall be no peace to him that goes out, nor to him that comes in; for there will be great vexations upon all the inhabitants of the earth; nation will break nation, and city city, and God will vex them with all adversity.” But as for you, you who find yourself upon the sure path of salvation and peace, “be comforted, be strong, let not your hands be slack: for your work shall be rewarded.” III. ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN III. ON THE KNOWLEDGE OF MEN Perhaps no one has ever seriously doubted that the ability to know and to pass an accurate judgment on men closely concerns our practical life; but whether a knowledge of human nature brings much happiness is a question on which opinions have always differed. While some declare that we really love men only so long as we do not know them, others (like the duke in Goethe’s “Tasso”) believe that it is only so long as we do not know men that we stand in fear of them; yet Goethe himself seems partly to retreat from this conception in another expression of his, where he says that while nothing is more interesting, indeed, than to learn to know men, yet one must take care not to know oneself.