Therefore the second counsel is more important for man as he is actually constituted: Free thyself at any cost from every sin thou bearest, if thou wouldst arrive at happiness. This way passes the unerring road; just as, in Purgatory, Dante could enter the portal of salvation only by passing the grave angel guardian sitting upon the diamond threshold with naked sword. There is no other way to set your soul truly free. Goethe, it is true, has tried in the second part of “Faust” to discover a kind of natural salvation from sin; and this, in fact, has remained the path which many, still to-day, are seeking out: namely, the noble enjoyment of nature, which at least now and then can silence the accusing voices within; with art and the charm of the beautiful, wherein many perceive at once the consummation and the expiation of material man; or finally, action, a share in the work of civilization, which is to uplift the depressed heart and to delude itself with the applause of the multitude, at least for the moment. But, alongside all this, nevertheless, sin remains inexorably standing, a melancholy fact; and even the great poet was unable to set it aside in any credible way. A divine love that receives a man to its bosom even though he be not repentant, but, on the contrary, persists to the last moment in defiantly living out his life in his own way--a divine love of this sort is a mere picture of the fancy, an arbitrary poetical invention, against which even Goethe’s Promethean soul was obliged, for its own honor, to protest with the last breath of the body. Yet even repentance does not alone release from sin, but there must be a trustful turning of the soul to God, whose mighty arm of mercy (as Manfred says in Dante’s great poem) receives all that turn to it; and it will not be prevented from doing so, even by an authoritative decree of a church. And in this regard the greatness of the sin is no matter. What _is_ great and small in human sin anyway, weighed, not according to human notions and the penal law-books, but in the eye of a judge who knows all and metes a perfect justice? Whoever finds within himself the courage to appeal to His mercy has already received it in all essentials, for the disfavor of God consists mainly in the “judgment of obduracy,” a judgment which lets the offender remain unbroken and defiant until his end, and prevents him from calling upon this mercy. Our churches, to be sure, have in a measure widely strayed from this simple way of atonement and affirm a very much more positive manner of salvation from sin, either through outward works, or at least through definite dogmatic conceptions of reconciliation with God.