we had a very serious conversation together. I was afraid that the admiration and the delight with which he had inspired me had caused me to withhold my own confession of faith—had caused me apparently to pay homage to his, and thereby to be unfaithful to my own higher love. This I could not be. And exactly because I regarded him as being so noble and magnanimous I wished to become clear before him as well as before my own conscience. I wished also to hear what objection he could bring forward against a world as viewed from the Christian point of view, which in concrete life and reality stands so infinitely above that of the pantheist, which resolves all concrete life into the elemental. I fancied that he, solely from the interest of a speculative question, would have been led out of the universal into the inward. Because, when all is said which the wisdom of antiquity and of the noblest stoicism can say about the Supreme Being, about the “superior soul” as an infinite law-giving, impersonal power, which brings forth, and then, regardless of any individual fate, absorbs into itself all beings, who must all blindly submit themselves as to an eternally unjust and unsympathetic law of the world,—how great and perfect is the doctrine that God is more than this law of the world; that he is a Father who regards every human being as His child, and has prepared for each, according to their kind, an eternal inheritance in His house, in His light; that He beholds even the falling sparrow;—this is a doctrine which satisfies the soul! And when all is said which the noblest stoicism can say to man about his duty and his highest nobility, if it made Epictetes and Socrates, and set Simeon Stylites on his pillar, how incomparably high and astonishing is this command to mankind:
“Be ye perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect!”—
A command, a purpose which it requires an eternity to attain to! And when all is said which all the wise men
