There was
one friend of the family, indeed, the Fraeulein von Klettenberg (the
_Schoene Seele_ of _Wilhelm Meister_), in whom Goethe saw the exemplar
of the religious life in its more ecstatic manifestations, but her
special influence on him belongs to a later date. In accordance with
the family rule he regularly attended church, but the homilies to
which he listened were not of a nature to quicken his religious
feelings, while the doctrinal instruction he received at home he has
himself described as "nothing but a dry kind of morality." Against one
article of the creed taught him--the doctrine of original and
inherited sin--all his instincts rebelled; and the antipathy was so
compact with all his later thinking that we may readily believe that
it manifested itself thus early. If we may accept his own account of
his youthful religious experiences, he was already on the way to that
_Ur-religion_, which was his maturest profession of faith, and which
he held to be the faith of select minds in all stages of human
history. Now, as at all periods of his life, it was the beneficent
powers in nature that most deeply impressed him, and he records how in
crude childish fashion he secretly reared an altar to these powers,
though an unlucky accident in the oblation prevented him from
repeating his act of worship.
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