“In order to represent humility symbolically by kneeling down one must feel oneself to be really a very exalted personage. It means—‘What God’s Son was in comparison with the apostles, I, the emperor, am in comparison with these poor folks’. This fundamental motive of the ceremony does not strike me as peculiarly humble.”
“What curious notions you have, Martha. In these three years that you have passed in solitude in the country, and in the perusal of wicked books, your ideas have become so perverted.”
“Wicked books?”
“Yes, wicked. I maintain that the word is correct. The other day when in my innocence I spoke to the archbishop about a book I had seen on your table, and which from its title I took for a religious work, The Life of Jesus, by one Strauss, why, he smote his hands together above his head, and cried out: ‘Merciful Heaven, how came you by such a profligate work?’ I turned as red as fire, and assured him that I had not read the book myself, but had only seen it at a relation’s. ‘Then demand of your relation, as she values her salvation, to throw this book into the fire.’ And that I do now Martha. Will you burn the book?”
“If we were two or three centuries earlier we might have watched, not the book, but the author, going to the flames. That would have been more effectual—more effectual for the time, though not for long.”
“You give me no answer. Will you burn this book?”
“No.”
“What! nothing but no?”
“Why should we have any long talk about it? We do not yet understand each other in these matters, dear auntie. Let me rather tell you what little Rudolf yesterday——”
And thus the conversation was happily led off to another and a fruitful subject, in which no difference of opinion came in between us; for we were both agreed on this matter, that Rudolf Dotzky was the dearest, the most original, and, for his age, the most advanced child in the world.