From this book, he tells us, he received a favourable impression of heretics, and the impression was comforting to one who, like himself, was looked on as a heretic by all his friends.

Moreover, he had often heard it said that in the long run every man must have his own religion; why, therefore, should he not essay to think out a creed that would at least satisfy himself?
In brief outline he has described the system which he evolved from his miscellaneous historical and scientific studies.

It is, as he himself says, a strange composite of Neo-Platonism, and of hermetical, mystical, and cabbalistical speculations, all leading by a necessary logic to the dogmas of Redemption and the Incarnation--a conclusion which at least points to the fact that for Goethe at this time Christianity was a religion specifically predestined for man's salvation.

"We all become mystics in old age," is a remark of his own at that period of life; and the conclusion of the Second Part of Faust, as well as other indications, proves that the remark was at least true of himself.

But, as has often been pointed out, not only in old age, but at every period of his life, there was a mystic strain in him which was only kept in check by what was the strongest instinct of his nature--the instinct that demanded the direct vision of the concrete fact as the only condition on which he could build "the pyramid of his life." [Footnote 52: Probably Goethe had this book in his mind when he wrote the sarcastic epigram:-- "Es ist die ganze Kirchengeschichte Mischmasch von Irrthum und von Gewalt."] Goethe's experience derived from his intercourse with Fraeulein von Klettenberg and her friends undoubtedly enriched his own nature and enlarged his conceptions of the content of human life, of its possible motives and ideals.