It need hardly be said that his attitude towards the Bible
was divided by an impassable gulf from the attitude of traditional
Christianity. For Goethe it was a purely human production, the
fortunate birth of a time and a race which in the nature of things can
never be paralleled. What the Churches have found in it was not for
him its inherent virtue. Even in his youth it was in its picturesque
presentation of a primitive life that he found what satisfied the
needs of his nature. The spiritual aspirations of the Psalms, the
moral indignation of the prophets, found no response in him either in
youth or manhood. His ideal of life was never that of the saints, but
it was an ideal, as his record of his early religious experience
shows, which had its roots in the nature which had been allotted him.
To certain events in his early life Goethe assigned a decisive
influence on his future development. To the gift of a set of puppets
by his grandmother he attributes his first awakened interest in the
drama; and the extraordinary detail with which Wilhelm Meister
describes his youthful absorption in the play of his puppets proves
that in his Autobiography Goethe does not lay undue stress on the
significance of the gift.
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