of everything—­even of every thought and volition of mine—­and so in a sense offers prayers to himself through me, or, if my will is independent of God’s will, it implies arrogance and a doubt as to the inflexibility as well as the perfection of the divine determination to believe that it can be influenced by human appeals.  When not quite seventeen years old I went to Goettingen University.  During the next eight years I seldom saw the home of my parents; my father indulgently refrained from interference; my mother censured me from far away when I neglected my studies and professional work, probably in the conviction that she must leave the rest to guidance from above:  with this exception I was literally cut off from the counsel and instruction of others.  In this period, when studies which ambition at times led me to prosecute zealously—­or emptiness and satiety, the inevitable companions of my way of living—­brought me nearer to the real meaning of life and eternity, it was in old-world philosophies, uncomprehended writings of Hegel, and particularly in Spinoza’s seeming mathematical clearness, that I sought for peace of mind in that which the human understanding cannot comprehend.  But it was loneliness that first led me to reflect on these things persistently, when I went to Kniephof, after my mother’s death, five or six years ago.  Though at first my views did not materially change at Kniephof, yet conscience began to be more audible in the solitude, and to represent that many a thing was wrong which I had before regarded as permissible.  Yet my struggle for insight was still confined to the circle of the understanding, and led me, while reading such writings as those of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer, only deeper into the blind alley of doubt.

I was firmly convinced that God has denied to man the possibility of true knowledge; that it is presumption to claim to understand the will and plans of the Lord of the World; that the individual must await in submission the judgment that his Creator will pass upon him in death, and that the will of God becomes known to us on earth solely through conscience, which He has given us as a special organ for feeling our way through the gloom of the world.  That I found no peace in these views I need not say.  Many an hour have I spent in disconsolate depression, thinking that my existence and that of others is purposeless and unprofitable—­perchance only a casual product of creation, coming and going like dust from rolling wheels.

About four years ago I came into close companionship, for the first time since my school-days, with Moritz Blankenburg, and found in him, what I had never had till then in my life, a friend; but the warm zeal of his love strove in vain to give me by persuasion and discussion what I lacked—­faith.  But through Moritz I made acquaintance with the Triglaf family and the social circle around it, and found in it people who made me ashamed that, with the scanty