m she had
introduced him in Strassburg. After telling her that he had been to
Holy Communion "to remind him of the sufferings and death of our
Lord," he proceeds: "My intercourse with the religious people here is
not quite hearty, though at first I did turn very heartily to them;
but it seems as if it were not to be. They are so deadly dull when
they begin that my natural vivacity cannot endure it." He goes on to
say that he has made the acquaintance of one who is of a different way
of thinking from these people--one "who from the coolness of blood
with which he has always regarded the world thinks he has discovered
that we are put in this world for the special purpose of being useful
in it; that we are capable of making ourselves so; that religion is of
some help in this; and that the most useful man is the best."[69]

[Footnote 68: Lerse, one of Goethe's friends in Strassburg, said: "Da
geriet Goethe oft in hohe Verzueckung, sprach Worte der Prophezeiung
und machte Lerse Besorgnisse, er werde ueberschnappen." (Goethe's
_Gespraeche_. Gesamtausgabe von Freiherrn v. Biedermann, Leipzig, 1909,
i. p. 19.)]

[Footnote 69: _Werke, Briefe_, Band i. pp. 245-7.]

The acquaintance to whom Goethe thus refers was the most important
person in the circle with which he was mainly associated during his
residence in Strassburg. It was a circle widely different in tastes
and ways of thinking from that which he had left at Frankfort. Boarded
in one house, the persons who composed it, about ten in number, daily
met at a common table. Of different ages, and mostly medical students,
their talk, as Goethe tells us, mainly turned on their professional
studies. The talk of medical students is not favourable to the
cultivation of a mystical piety, and it need not surprise us that a
few weeks in this atmosphere were sufficient to give Goethe a growing
distaste for those religious sentiments which in his case were only a
morbid distortion of his natural instincts. Yet during these
Strassburg days there is no trace in him of that anti-Christian
attitude of mind which was to be one of his later phases. He
decisively dissociated himself from the Herrnhut society, and he
ceased to speak in their language, but, as we have seen, he was still
disposed to assign to religion a due place in the lives of reasonable
men.

In the president of the common table, Dr. Salzmann, the acquaintance
to whom he referred, Goethe found one who by his personal charac