Buechner, in his lecture on "Gottesbegriff und dessen {234} Bedeutung" ("The Idea of God and its Importance"), replaces the moral principle (which in his opinion is nothing innate but something acquired) by education, learning, freedom and well-being; says that only atheism or philosophic monism leads to freedom, reason, progress, acknowledgment of true humanity--to humanism; that this humanism seeks the motives of its morality not in the external relations to an extramundane God, but in itself and in the welfare of mankind; and that infidels often, even as a rule, have excelled by moral conduct, while Christianity has originated many more crimes than it has hindered, and it would no longer be possible to establish with real Christians a vital community as at present understood. He declares the utterance of Madame de Stael, that "to comprehend everything means to forgive everything," the truest word ever spoken; and concludes his lecture with the remarks that the more man renounces his faith and confides in his own power, his own reason, his own reflexion, the happier he will be and the more successful in his struggle for existence. Strauss in "The Old Faith and the New," a publication which certainly has to be ranked here, for the reason that in it he founds on Darwinism his whole knowledge of the world, on the ground of which he wishes to arrange life, appears to be much more decent, and in the practical consequences much more conservative, than Buechner; but essentially stands upon quite the same ground. Haeckel, Oskar Schmidt, and (as to his linguistic Darwinism) W. Bleek, group themselves around Strauss, partly with, partly without express reference to his deductions. {235}