from the existing language; they exaggerated in Asiatic and rhetorical fashion and were intended to have whatever validity they could; they reckoned on more than due deduction being made in any case, but were never seriously measured, weighed, or intended. The Reformation took them with German seriousness at their full weight; it was right in thinking that everything should be taken thus, but wrong in thinking that the others had actually so taken it, and in blaming them for anything more than their natural superficiality and lack of thoroughness. In general, we may say that this is what always happens in every conflict of German seriousness with the foreign spirit, whether the latter is found in foreign or in German lands; the foreign spirit is quite unable to comprehend how anyone can wish to raise such a great to-do about unimportant things like words and phrases. Foreigners, when they hear it again from German mouths, deny that they said what they did in fact say, and what they go on saying and always will say. So they complain of calumny, or pushing consistency too far, as they call it, when one takes their utterances in their literal sense and as seriously intended, and treats them as part of a logical sequence of thought, which one traces back to its principles and forward to its conclusions; although one is perhaps very far from attributing to them in person a clear consciousness of what they say or any logical consistency. In the demand that one must take everything as it is meant, but not go further and call in question the right to have opinions and to express them—in that demand the foreign spirit always betrays itself, however deeply it may be concealed.
77. The seriousness with which the old system of religious doctrine was now taken compelled this system itself to be more serious than it had been hitherto,
