deeply loved and venerated on that account by Jean Paul, stood up for the maintenance of religious faith and hope against the empty, vain eclecticism, and the cold and sneering scepticism of the age; and it is not too much to say, that Jean Paul's whole tendency and ambition was, to be, as a poet, his ally and fellow-soldier in that good cause.
It is, therefore, infinitely disgusting to find, not only among ourselves Socinianism pressing Jean Paul into its service, as if he had been one of that ilk, but in Germany also his posthumous papers abused, and that by his own son-in-law[1], for the purpose of throwing his great name into the scale of the shallow infidelity of the "friends of light." Jean Paul was certainly far from being an orthodox divine, or a man of sound opinions on the subject of revealed religion; but in order correctly to appreciate the value of that fact, both in regard to his own character, and to his influence upon the public, we must bear in mind what was the general tone and tendency of the age in which he rose. That was decidedly towards unbelief; while Jean Paul's tendency, on the contrary, was towards faith. On the ladder of truth which God has let down upon the earth out of heaven, some are ascending, while others are descending back again to their earthly systems of ignorance and error; those that ascend and those that descend may chance to meet on the same round, but it is manifest folly thence to conclude that they stand in the same relation to truth. So it is with Jean Paul and the rationalists: he was strenuously working his way upwards into the regions of faith, they are sliding down rapidly towards the abyss of unbelief: they may occasionally strike the same notes, but the keys in which they play are widely different, and not the keys only, but the whole spirit of their music,—the one being a constant effort to produce harmony, the other a perpetual hammering out of dissonances.
We have thought it due to the memory of Jean Paul to vin-
- ↑ Since the completion of the edition of his collected works, Dr. Förster has published, at Frankfort, 1845, two volumes of selections from Jean Paul's posthumous papers, and among them an essay "against hyper-Christianity," written by Jean Paul under the painful excitement caused by the premature death of his son, which was attributed to the effect of religious enthusiasm upon a feeble frame. This collection of fragments bears the quaint name of "Der Papier-drache," i.e. the paper-kite; a name under which Jean Paul himself announced his intention of publishing the numberless literary scraps which had accumulated under his hands, and which he had not "used up" in the composition of his different works. These he meant to connect together without much system, in the same way that boys paste and string papers of all sizes and colours together in making their kites, whence the name Papier-drache, or "paper-kite," not "paper-dragon," as we have seen it somewhere infelicitously translated.
