To the same year, 1772, belong two short productions of Goethe which deserve a passing notice as exhibiting his strange blending of interests at this period. The one is entitled _Brief des Pastors zu ... an den neuen Pastor zu ..._, and professes to have been translated from the French. The Letter is another illustration of his interest in religion and in the interpretation of the Bible which had begun with his early reading of the Old Testament, and which his intercourse with the Fraeulein von Klettenberg and Herder had intermittently kept alive. The theological teaching of the Letter is, in point of fact, a compound of the teaching of these two. Its main object is to emphasise the necessity of toleration in the interest of religion itself, and nowhere was the monition more needed than in Frankfort, where the antipathy between those of the Reformed and the Lutheran communions was such as even to debar intermarriage. Rationalism and dogmatism are equally reprobated, and the sum of all true religion is found to consist in the love of God and of our neighbour. The strain of mystical piety which runs through the whole production doubtless proceeds from imaginative sympathy and not from personal experience, and is to be regarded only as another illustration of Goethe's facility in identifying himself with emotions essentially alien to his own nature. The other piece, entitled _Zwo wichtige bisher uneroerterte biblische Fragen, zum erstenmal gruendlich beantwortet_, professing to be written by a Swabian pastor, is still more singular. In the first of the two questions he inquires whether it was the Ten Commandments or the prescriptions of ritual that were inscribed on the tables of stone, and concludes that it was the latter; and in the second he discusses the nature of the speaking with tongues that followed St. Paul's laying of hands on the newly-baptised Christians, and resolves the question in a purely mystical sense.