At a subsequent interview, when Mr. Lobeck called on me, he said, "We have decided on attending your chapel if we can be accommodated with a pew." On expressing some degree of surprise that Mrs. Lobeck should be willing to leave her church, with all its long-cherished predilections and associations, he replied—
"She still gives it the preference, but a paramount sense of duty now compels her to take this step. She was pleased with the extreme simplicity of your mode of worship the first time she came; and has on several occasions expressed her approbation of the momentous truths you have inculcated on the attention of your audience; but your discourse on Sabbath evening, from Acts xvi. 14, brought her long-hesitating mind to this decision. As we were returning home, after alluding to the hymn, and to the singing, which she very much enjoys, she remarked she now felt no surprise that I should prefer the preaching at the chapel to the preaching at the church; because, in her opinion, it is more interesting and instructive. 'It is,' she added, 'quite a relief to hear no more prosing about the regular succession question, or about the font and its mysteries. This clergyman makes one think of one's self, of God, of another world, and our Saviour Jesus Christ.'"
As they were now become my stated hearers, a close intimacy soon sprang up between us; and on one occasion, when alluding to the state of religion on the Continent, he said, with emphatic earnestness, "My country, Sir, is the land of spiritual barrenness; death reigns there. Infidelity is awfully dominant, and fatally powerful."
"But I have heard it now assumes an aspect somewhat different from the infidelity introduced by Voltaire, and which I believe was aided in its progress by the more fascinating genius of Rousseau."
"Yes, Sir, it is now the infidelity of Goethe, a man of extraordinary mental power—a most subtle and beguiling writer. Voltaire was an intellectual sceptic, who denounced Christianity as an imposition on human credulity, and he advocated its suppression and extermination. Rousseau was a sentimental sceptic, who contemplated Christianity with the same class of emotions as he surveyed the beauties and the deformities of nature; regarding it as a strange compound of moral grandeur and of meanness, which, in his estimation, might remain amongst a people without doing any social injury, and might be got rid of without their sustaining any irreparable loss. Goethe is a rational sceptic, or what is called in Germany a rationalist. His disposition is not mocking like that of Voltaire and others, nor does he ever indulge in burlesque or ridicule, when speaking of the popular faith. He uniformly evinces a marked respect for the ordinary doctrines and ethics of Christianity, while the drift of his writings is to prove that the real religion of a man's heart, and the real end of his existence, lie in the refined cultivation of his mind and affections, and in subjecting all irregular impulses and passions to a course of due restraint."
"The infidelity of these sceptical writers who have done so much mischief on the Continent, and in England too, is substantially the same in its origin, in its essence, and in its tendencies, though there is a slight variation in its phases, its developments, and in its designs."
"Infidelity, Sir, under any phase, or in any form of development, is a destroying power; and its progress may be traced, like that of an epidemic, by the scenes of desolation which it leaves in its track. There would be some difficulty in adjusting the comparative injury which these distinguished sceptics have entailed on the moral and religious world; but it is very evident to any one who studies their writings, that they all tend to the same issue. The primary lessons which they all teach are these—that man needs no Divine instructor, which supersedes the necessity of revelation; that his own reason is sufficient to enable him to discover the safe road to true happiness and moral greatness, which supersedes the necessity of priestly instruction and training; and that he need do nothing more for his present well-being, and his future destiny, if there be a futurity, than cultivate his own tastes and social virtues."
"But I suppose Goethe has done more moral injury amongst the theologians of Germany than any other sceptical writer."
"I have no doubt of it; and also amongst all classes of literary men. I was once one of his devoted disciples; he ruled my mind with despotic sway. I revered him as an oracle. He stood, in my estimation, both in intellectual greatness and in the accuracy of his moral discoveries, far above any of the writers of the Old or New Testaments. He gave me a distaste for the Bible, and a loathing against its sublime and momentous doctrines; and I believe that his writings have tainted to a fearful extent the theology of the pulpits of Germany. There are a few able and eloquent men, who preach Christ and him crucified, in close imitation of Paul; but only a comparatively small number. Human reason is the popular idol amongst the majority; they keep the cross of Christ in the background; the atonement is repudiated by them. They maintain from the press and from the pulpit, and with as much strenuous earnestness as any of the infidel fraternity, that man has within himself a self-sufficient power to secure his present and his future happiness, without being at all dependent on the grace of God or the love of Christ."
"A sad change since the palmy days of Luther, and the other great Reformers."