Rationalism and dogmatism are
equally reprobated, and the sum of all true religion is found to
consist in the love of God and of our neighbour. The strain of
mystical piety which runs through the whole production doubtless
proceeds from imaginative sympathy and not from personal experience,
and is to be regarded only as another illustration of Goethe's
facility in identifying himself with emotions essentially alien to his
own nature. The other piece, entitled _Zwo wichtige bisher uneroerterte
biblische Fragen, zum erstenmal gruendlich beantwortet_, professing to
be written by a Swabian pastor, is still more singular. In the first
of the two questions he inquires whether it was the Ten Commandments
or the prescriptions of ritual that were inscribed on the tables of
stone, and concludes that it was the latter; and in the second he
discusses the nature of the speaking with tongues that followed St.
Paul's laying of hands on the newly-baptised Christians, and resolves
the question in a purely mystical sense.
The year 1773 marks an epoch in Goethe's career, and an epoch also in
the literary history of Germany. In that year he made his first appeal
as a writer to the great German public which was to follow his
successive productions with varying degrees of admiration during the
next half-century.
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