human
Adapted for the German People. From his first entrance into the arena he had met with endless odium theologicum; being at once deprived of his post as a philosophical lecturer at Tübingen, and virulently denounced on all hands. His proposed appointment to a chair at Zürich in 1839, as we have seen, led there to something approaching a revolution. Later, he found that acquaintance with him was made a ground of damage to his friends; and though he had actually been elected to the Wirtemberg Diet in 1848 by his fellow citizens of Ludwigsburg town, after being defeated in his candidature for the new parliament at Frankfort through the hostility of the rural voters, he had abundant cause to regard himself as a banned person in Germany. A craving for the goodwill of the people as against the hatred of the priests was thus very naturally and justifiably operative in the conception of his second work; and this none the less because his fundamental political conservatism had soon cut short his representation of radical Ludwigsburg. As he justly said, the question of the true history of Christianity was not one for theologians alone. But the emotional aim affected the intellectual process. As previously in his Life of Ulrich von Hutten, he strove to establish the proposition that the new Reformation he desired was akin to the old; and that the Germans, as the
gpt
would show themselves true to their past by casting out the religion of dogma and supernaturalism. Such an attempt to identify the spirit of freethought with the old spirit of Bibliolatry was in itself fantastic, and could not create a genuine movement, though the book had a wide audience. The Glaubenslehre, in which he made good his maxim that