Hagenbach even takes as "the representative of the rationalism of his
age." In his juvenile Robbers, indeed, he makes his worst villains
freethinkers; and in the preface he stoutly champions religion
against all assailants; but hardly ever after that piece does he give
a favourable portrait of a priest. [1430] He himself soon joined the
Aufklärung; and all his æsthetic appreciation of Christianity never
carried him beyond the position that it virtually had the tendency
(Anlage) to the highest and noblest, though that was in general
tastelessly and repulsively represented by Christians. He added that
in a certain sense it is the only æsthetic religion, whence it is
that it gives such pleasure to the feminine nature, and that only
among women is it to be met with in a tolerable form. [1431] Like
Goethe, he sought to reduce the Biblical supernatural to the plane
of possibility, [1432] in the manner of the liberal theologians of
the period; and like him he often writes as a deist, [1433] though
professedly for a time a Kantist. On the other hand, he does not
hesitate to say that a healthy nature (which Goethe had said needed
no morality, no Natur-recht, [1434] and no political metaphysic)
required neither deity nor immortality to sustain it. [1435]