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Confession, under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the questions:
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Are we still Christians? ;
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Have we still religion? ;
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How do we conceive the world? ;
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How do we order our life? ; and it answered them all in a calmly and uncompromisingly naturalistic sense, dismissing all that men commonly call religious belief. The book as a whole is heterogeneous in respect of its two final chapters,
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Of our Great Poets and
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Of our Great Musicians, which seem to have been appended by way of keeping up the attitude of national fraternity evoked by the war. But they could not and did not avail to conciliate the theologians, who opened fire on the book with all their old animosity, and with an unconcealed delight in the definite committal of the great negative critic to an attitude of practical atheism. The book ran through six editions in as many months, and crystallized much of the indefinite freethinking of Germany into something clearer and firmer. All the more was it a new engine of strife and disintegration; and the aging author, shocked but steadied by the unexpected outburst of hostility, penned a quatrain to himself, ending:
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In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end.
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summing up his work and his position. He had not written, he declared, by way of contending with opponents; he had sought rather to commune with those of his own way of thinking; and to them, he felt, he had the right to appeal to live up to their convictions, not compromising with other opinions, and not adhering to any Church. For his
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Confession he anticipated the thanks of a more enlightened future generation.
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The time of agreement, he concluded,