boastful open-letters to Renan explaining that whatsoever Germany
did was right, and whatsoever France did was wrong, and that the
annexation of Alsace and Lorraine was altogether just. These letters
form an important contribution to the vast cairn of self-praise
raised by latter-day German culture. But Strauss's literary life
ended on a nobler note and in a higher warfare. After all his efforts
at popularity, and all his fraternization with his people on the
ground of racial animosity (not visible in his volume of lectures on
Voltaire, written and delivered at the request of the Princess Alice),
his fundamental sincerity moved him to produce a final "Confession,"
under the title of The Old and the New Faith (1872). It asked the
questions: "Are we still Christians?"; "Have we still religion?";
"How do we conceive the world?"; "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,
"Of our Great Poets" and "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: "In storm hast thou begun; in storm shalt thou end."
On the last day of the year he wrote an "afterword" 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 "Confession" he anticipated
the thanks of a more enlightened future generation. "The time of
agreement," he concluded, "will come, as it came for the Leben Jesu;
only this time I shall not live to see it." [1800] A little more than
a year later (1874) he passed away.
It is noteworthy that he should have held that agreement had come as
to the first Leben Jesu. He was in fact convinced that all educated
men--at least in Germany--had ceased to believe in miracles and the
supernatural, however they might affect to conform to orthodoxy. And,
broadly speaking, this was true: all New Testament criticism of
any standing had come round to the naturalistic point of view. But,
as we have seen, the second Leben Jesu was far enough from reaching
a solid historical footing; and the generation which followed made
only a piecemeal and unsystematic advance to a scientific solution.