In this year, accordingly, the Emperor made his remarkable confession of religious faith to his friend, Admiral Hollmann.  He had just heard a lecture by Professor Delitzsch on “Babel und Bibel,” and as he considered the Professor’s views to some extent subversive of orthodox Christian belief, he took the opportunity to tell his people his own sentiments on the whole matter.  In writing to Admiral Hollmann he instructed him to make the “confession” as public as possible, and it was published in the October number of the Grenzboten, a Saxon monthly, sometimes used for official pronouncements.  The Emperor’s letter to Admiral Hollmann contained what follows:—­

“I distinguish between two different sorts of Revelation:  a current, to a certain extent historical, and a purely religious, which was meant to prepare the way for the appearance of the Messiah.  As to the first, I should say that I have not the slightest doubt that God eternally revealed Himself to the race of mankind He created.  He breathed into man His breath, that is a portion of Himself, a soul.  With fatherly love and interest He followed the development of humanity; in order to lead and encourage it further He ‘revealed’ Himself, now in the person of this, now of that great wise man, priest or king, whether pagan, Jew or Christian.  Hammurabi was one of these, Moses, Abraham, Homer, Charlemagne, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, Kaiser William the Great—­these He selected and honoured with His Grace, to achieve for their peoples, according to His will, things noble and imperishable.  How often has not my grandfather explicitly declared that he was an instrument in the hand of the Lord!  The works of great souls are the gifts of God to the people, that they may be able to build further on them as models, that they may be able to feel further through the confusion of the undiscovered here below.  Doubtless God has ‘revealed’ Himself to different peoples in different ways according to their situation and the degree of their civilization.  Then just as we are overborne most by the greatness and might of the lovely nature of the Creation when we regard it, and as we look are astonished at the greatness of God there displayed, even so can we of a surety thankfully and admiringly recognize, by whatever truly great or noble thing a man or a people does, the revelation of God.  His influence acts on us and among us directly.

“The second sort of Revelation, the more religious sort, is that which led up to the appearance of the Lord.  From Abraham onward it was introduced, slowly but foreseeingly, all-wisely and all-knowingly, for otherwise humanity were lost.  And now commences the astonishing working of God’s Revelation.  The race of Abraham and the peoples that sprang from it regard, with an iron logic, as their holiest possession, the belief in a God.  They must worship and cultivate Him.  Broken up during the captivity in Egypt, the separated parts were brought together again