be no question that religion engaged
both his intellect and his emotions as a boy; and the fact is
conclusive that religious instincts were not left out of his
nature.[11]

[Footnote 11: With reference to what he says of his Biblical studies
he wrote as follows to a correspondent (January 30th, 1812)
[Transcriber's Note: corrected error "1912"]: "Dass Sie meine
asiatischen Weltanfaenge so freundlich aufnehmen, ist mir von grossem
Wert. Es schlingt sich die daher fuer mich gewonnene Kultur durch mein
ganzes Leben...."]

There was nothing in the influence of his home that was specially
fitted to awaken religious feeling or to occasion abnormal spiritual
experiences. In religion as in everything else the father was a
formalist, and such religious views as he held were those of the
_Aufklaerung_, for which all forms of spiritual emotion were the folly
of unreason. Religion was a permanent and sustaining influence in the
life of Goethe's mother, but her religion consisted simply in a
cheerful acquiescence in the decrees of Providence. Of the soul's
trials and sorrows, as they are recorded in the annals of the
religious life, her nature was incapable, and she was always perfectly
at ease in Zion. By his mother, therefore, the son could not be deeply
moved to concern regarding his spiritual welfare, nor to make religion
the all-engrossing subject of his thoughts and affections. There was
one friend of the family, indeed, the Fraeulein von Klettenberg (the
_Schoene Seele_ of _Wilhelm Meister_), in whom Goethe saw the exemplar
of the religious life in its more ecstatic manifestations, but her
special influence on him belongs to a later date. In accordance with
the family rule he regularly attended church, but the homilies to
which he listened were not of a nature to quicken his religious
feelings, while the doctrinal instruction he received at home he has
himself described as "nothing but a dry kind of morality." Against one
article of the creed taught him--the doctrine of original and
inherited sin--all his instincts rebelled; and the antipathy was so
compact with all his later thinking that we may readily believe that
it manifested itself thus early. If we may accept his own account of
his youthful religious experiences, he was already on the way to that
_Ur-religion_, which was his maturest profession of faith, and which
he held to be the faith of select minds in all stages of human
history. Now, as at all periods of his