“You see,” he says to his brother, “that I am not intolerant. But I hope to God that I shall never be tolerant in the newest sense of the word—that is, indifferent, lukewarm, fit to be spat out of the mouth of Jesus Christ.”... “Do not let,” he says to his son Caius at Göttingen University, “yourself be led away from the rock-founded church by the many good and worthy Protestants you meet. Among all in error are many who are individually children of God, but they have no church, no sacrifice, no priesthood, no Eucharist. The helter-skelter union of both Protestant bodies (the Lutheran and the Calvinist) must give serious scandal to the earnest souls in both, and will, I hope, lead many into our church.”

Of the difference between feeling and truth he says:

“Certain sensations may be real to one person and unreal to another. Not so with facts and doctrine. It is the peculiar character of the true religion that as it must be the same in all ages, so must every man be equally able to understand and embrace it.... I could not believe in a true religion which it would not be possible for every human being to believe in.... He leads some through rough paths, others through smooth ones; some towards truth, some through error. The way of error, as such, is not His way, although he is always ready to unfold the truth, to be beforehand with, and to meet half way, the upright soul who in all simplicity holds an erring belief.”

Indeed, in Stolberg’s experience, the difference between lukewarm and conscientious Protestants was fully shown; for the former reviled him for his change of religion, while the latter approved of his following what he looked upon as truth. Other misconceptions of Catholic doctrine he also combated, and greatly enlightened many of his friends on the Catholic belief in the justifying merits of Christ. Holy Scripture was a source from which he considered spiritual light to come, but, as he observed, “the learned have not yet been able to see that the healthy eye, like the concave mirror, gathers into one point all the scattered rays, while they split and split until the last particle of light is lost in shadow.” Elsewhere he says:

“He who is careless of Holy Writ is careless of the life of the soul, and he is happy if he becomes conscious, were it only now and then, of the fact that the world, whether with its pleasures or its wisdom, offers him nothing but what is poisonous to the immortal spirit.”

His advice to his son Ernest, who left home in 1803 to join the Austrian army, is full of the true Christian spirit. He recommends him to practise every virtue that would make a man perfect, and goes into many details which, of course, we cannot follow here, but this sentence is almost a compendium of the whole:

“A true Christian cannot find true freedom nor true unsolicitude but in the possession of a good conscience. Where the conscience is tender and watchful it watches alike over every act; and the more we pay attention to it, so much the more does it become, notwithstanding the violence it at first does to nature, a principle of our life which puts us in harmony with ourselves, and therefore makes us truly free.”

Elsewhere he says, speaking to another youth, a friend of his sons:

“Lassitude and a want of courage increase the strength of the enemy; and discontent concerning the post to which God has appointed us is unseemly in any brave man, much more in a foremost fighter. Not the wish that 'everything were otherwise,’ but the resolve always to act well and bravely—or, as Holy Writ says, 'to walk before God and be perfect’—can make men of us. That wish unnerves us; this resolve strengthens us and gives us a might which remains with the weapons of the fighter even on the other side of the grave. He who has done and suffered much does not dream of soiling his crown with tears, while he who has as yet found no opportunity of doing or suffering has still less a right to weep.”

The melancholy which the French have aptly called “la maladie du siècle”[[89]] was abhorrent to Stolberg—that unmanliness and cowardice of mind which became fashionable through the writings of atheists, and which in many phases has spread itself into our present literature as well as our practice. He also writes concerning the same thing: