Continuing his descent, he first visits the Catholic countries where
he finds that in the multitude of crosses Christ and the Cross are
forgotten. Passing into a land where Protestantism is the professed
religion, he sees a similar state of things. He meets by the way a
country parson who has a fat wife and many children, and "does not
disturb himself about God in Heaven." Next he requests to be conducted
to the Oberpfarrer of the neighbourhood, in whom he might expect to
find "a man of God," and the fragment ends with an account of his
interview with the Oberpfarrer's cook, Hogarthian in its broad humour,
but disquieting even to the reader who may hold with Jean Paul that
the test of one's faith is the capacity to laugh at its object.
Goethe forbade the publication of _Der Ewige Jude_, and we can
understand his reason for the prohibition.[175] To many persons for
whose religious feelings he had a genuine respect--to his mother among
others--the poem would have been a cause of offence of which Goethe
was not the man to be guilty. Moreover, a continuous work in such a
vein was alien to Goethe's own genius. As we have them, the fragments
are but another specimen of that "godlike insolence" which, in his
later years, he found in his satires on Herder, Wieland, and others.
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