What the Churches have found in it was not for him its inherent virtue.

Even in his youth it was in its picturesque presentation of a primitive life that he found what satisfied the needs of his nature.

The spiritual aspirations of the Psalms, the moral indignation of the prophets, found no response in him either in youth or manhood.

His ideal of life was never that of the saints, but it was an ideal, as his record of his early religious experience shows, which had its roots in the nature which had been allotted him.
To certain events in his early life Goethe assigned a decisive influence on his future development.

To the gift of a set of puppets by his grandmother he attributes his first awakened interest in the drama; and the extraordinary detail with which Wilhelm Meister describes his youthful absorption in the play of his puppets proves that in his Autobiography Goethe does not lay undue stress on the significance of the gift.