Fritzo Graebero. July 12. Really, you could condescend to write 
to me. It will soon be five weeks since I received your last 
letter — I chucked a mass of sceptical bricks at you when I last 
wrote; I would have understood the thing differently had I then 
been acquainted with Schleiermacher’s teaching. For that is still a 
reasonable kind of Christianity. Everybody finds it clear even if 
one does not actually accept it, and one can recognise its value 
without feeling obliged to adopt it. I. have already accepted the 
philosophical principles which I found in the teaching. But I am 
not quite clear about his theory of salvation and I will guard 
against accepting it immediately as a conviction so that I may not 
soon have to change again. But I will.study it as soon as I-have the 
time and the opportunity. If I had come into contact with this 
teaching before, I would never have become a rationalist, but 
where do you hear about things like this in our Muckertal*? I feel 
a blazing anger at this kind of thing, and will fight against pietism 
and literal belief as long as I can. What is this nonsense? What is 
rejected by science, the development of which now includes the 
whole of church history, should no longer exist in life either. 
Pietism may have been an historically justified element in the 
development of theology in former times. It obtained its lawful 
right, it lived and should not now refuse to make way for 
speculative theology. It is only out of this latter that any certainty 
can be developed. I cannot understand how one can still try to 
maintain literal belief in the Bible or defend the direct influence 
of God, since this cannot be proved anywhere. 

July 26. So here you are. To business. It is quite remarkable 
how in your letter you cling to orthodoxy and yet manage to 
concede some points to a rationalising trend, thus providing me 
with a weapon. Joseph’s family tree. To my first objection you 
reply: “Who knows whether we have not often read son instead of 
son-in-law or nephew in the genealogical tables in the Bible?” Are 
you not destroying the whole credibility of the biblical genealogical 
tables when you say this? I cannot at all understand how the law is 
supposed to prove anything here-—-To my second objection you 

reply: “Luke wrote for Theophilus.” Dear Fritz, what kind of 
inspiration is that which has such consideration for the level of 
knowledge possessed by the one into whose hands the book 
happens to come first? If there is not also consideration for all 
future readers, then I cannot acknowledge any inspiration at all. 
In general, you do not as yet seem to be clear about the concept of 
inspiration. 3) How Joseph’s genealogical table demonstrates the 
fulfilment of the prophecy, I am incapable of understanding. On 
the contrary, the Evangelists should have been above all concerned 
not to present Jesus as the son of Joseph, to destroy this view, and 
not at all to honour Joseph by thus presenting his genealogical 
table — “To say that Jesus was a son of Mary and that Mary was a 
daughter of Elijah would have been quite contrary to custom.” 
Dear Fritz, can custom have the slightest influence here? Make 
sure whether by talking like this you are not once more going 
against your conception of inspiration. Really, I cannot regard 
your explanation as anything but so completely forced that if I 
were in your place I would rather conclude that one or the other 
was wrong.— “Insoluble doubts must confront Christianity, and 
yet we can arrive at certainty through God’s mercy.” I doubt this 
influence of God’s mercy on the individual in the form in which 
you have it. I well know the feeling of happiness everyone has, 
rationalist or mystic alike, who places himself in a close, heartfelt 
relationship with God; but make yourself clear about it, think 
about it without using biblical phrases, and you will find that it is 
the consciousness that mankind is of divine origin, that you, as 
part of this mankind, can never be lost and that after all the 
countless struggles in this world, as in the next, you must return, 
divested of all that is mortal and sinful, to God’s bosom; that is my 
conviction, and I am at rest with it. To this extent, I can also tell 
you that God’s Spirit gives me testimony that I am a child of God 
and, as I have said, I cannot believe that you could say it in any 
other way. To be sure, you are much calmer about it, while I am 
still threshing around with all kinds of opinions and cannot let my 
conviction remain in its present undeveloped state; but because of 
that I can indeed acknowledge the difference quantitatively but 
not qualitatively—I readily admit that I am a sinner and that I 
have a deep-rooted propensity to sin and I refrain completely 
from any justification by works. But I do not admit that this 
sinfulness lies in the will of man. I readily admit that though the 
possibility of sinning is not inherent in the idea of humanity, it 
must necessarily be inherent in its realisation. I am therefore certainly 
as penitent as anyone can possibly demand, but, my dear Fritz, no 

thinking person can believe that my sins can be remitted by the 
merits of a third party. When I think about this independently of 
all authority, then I find, like the new theology, that the sinfulness 
of man lies in the necessarily imperfect realisation of the idea, that 
it must therefore be the striving of everyone to realise in himself 
the idea of humanity, ie., to make himself the equal of God in 
spiritual perfection. That is something quite subjective. How can 
the orthodox theory of salvation, which posits a third, something 
objective, accomplish this subjective development? I admit that I 
deserve to be punished, and if God wishes to punish me, let Him 
do so, but eternal banishment even of the least part of the Spirit 
from God —this I find it quite impossible to conceive or to believe. 
It is, of course, true that it is God’s mercy that He accepts us. 
Everything God does is mercy, but everything He does is likewise 
necessity. The unity of these contradictions constitutes an essential 
part of the essence of God. What you say later about God not 
being able to deny Himself, etc., sounds to me as if you wanted to 
evade my question. Can you believe that a man who strives for 
union with God ought to be rejected by God for all eternity? Can 
you? You can’t, so you beat about the bush. Is it not very base to 
believe that God would inflict further punishment for past 
wickedness, in addition to that already contained in the wicked 
deed itself? Alongside eternal punishment you must also set 
eternal sin, and alongside eternal sin eternal possibility of believing 
and, therefore, of being saved. The teaching of eternal damnation 
is terribly inconsistent. Furthermore: historical belief is for you a 
great essential of belief, without it belief is unthinkable. But you 
will not deny that there are people for whom it is quite impossible to 
have this historical belief. And should God require such people to 
do the impossible? Dear Fritz, just think—this would be nonsense 
and God’s reason is certainly higher than ours, but still not of a 
different kind, for otherwise it would no longer be reason. The 
biblical dogmas also are to be understood by using reason.— Not 
to be able to doubt, you say, is freedom of the mind? It is the 
greatest enslavement of the mind. He only is free who has 
overcome every doubt concerning his conviction. And I am not 
even demanding that you refute me. I challenge all orthodox 
theology to refute me. Christian scholarship is now all of 1,800 
years old and has been unable to bring forward any counter- 
arguments against rationalism, and has only repulsed a few of its 
attacks; nay, it shies away from the fight in the purely scientific 
field and prefers to drag the personalities of its opponents in the 
mud — what is a man to say to that? Indeed, is orthodox Christian 

teaching capable of being purely scientific? 1 say no. What more 
can it do than engage in a little classifying, explaining, disputing? I 
advise you to read some time Darstellung und Kritik des modernen 
Pietismus by Dr. C. Marklin, Stuttgart, 1839. If you can refute it 
(that is, not what is positive, but what is negative in it), you will be 
the world’s leading theologian “The simple Christian can rest 
quite content with this; he knows that he is a child of God, and it 
is not necessary for him to be able to give answers to all apparent 
contradictions.” Neither the simple Christian nor Hengstenberg 
can give answers to the “apparent contradictions”, for they are 
real contradictions; but truly, whoever rests content and prides 
himself on his faith, has in reality no basis whatever for his faith. 
True, feeling can confirm, but it can most certainly not furnish a 
basis—that would be like wanting to smell with one’s ears. What 
makes Hengstenberg so detestable to me is the really scandalous 
editing of the Kirchen-Zeitung* Nearly all the contributors remain 
anonymous and the editor, therefore, has to be responsible for 
them; but if somebody who has been attacked in the paper takes 
him to task, then Herr Hengstenberg denies all knowledge of the 
matter, will not reveal the name of the author, but also disclaims 
all responsibility. This has already happened to many a poor devil 
who has been attacked by God knows what miserable lout in the 
Kirchen-Zeitung and the only answer he got from Hengstenberg 
when he approached him about it was that it was not he who wrote 
the article. The Kirchen-Zeitung still enjoys a big reputation among 
the pietist preachers because they do not read anything opposed 
to it, and so it keeps going. I have not read the latest issues, 
otherwise I would quote you examples. You cannot imagine how 
abominably the Kirchen-Zeitung slandered and abused Strauss in 
connection with his Zurich affair, while all reports are unanim- 
ous in saying that he behaved quite nobly over the whole business. 
Why, for example, is the Kirchen-Zeitung so very eager to bracket 
Strauss with Young Germany? And unfortunately many people 
regard Young Germany as something terribly wicked.— You un- 
derstood me quite wrongly with regard to the poetry of belief. I 
did not believe because of the poetry. I believed because I realised 
that I could no longer live only for the day, because I repented of 
my sins, because I needed communion with God. I gladly gave 
away immediately what I most loved, I turned my back on my 
greatest joys, my dearest acquaintances, I made myself look 
ridiculous to everybody everywhere. It was an immense joy to me 

when I found in Pliimacher someone with whom I could talk 
about it, and I gladly put up with his fanaticism concerning 
predestination. You know yourself that I was in earnest, in dead 
earnest. I was happy then, that I know, and I am still just as 
happy; I had trust and joy when I prayed; I have them now too, I 
have them even more because I am struggling and need to be 
strengthened. But I have never experienced anything of that 
ecstatic bliss I heard so much about from our pulpits. My religion 
was — and is— quiet, blessed peace, and if I have it after my death 
then I shall be satisfied. I have no reason to believe that God will 
take it from me. Religious conviction is a matter of the heart and 
is only concerned with dogma insofar as dogma is or is not 
contradicted by feeling. Thus the Spirit of God may convince you 
through your feeling that you are a child of God—that is quite 
possible; but it most certainly cannot so convince you that you are 
a child of God through the death of Christ; otherwise feeling 
would be capable of thinking and your ears of seeing—I pray 
daily, indeed nearly the whole day, for truth, I have done so ever 
since I began to have doubts, but I still cannot return to your 
faith. And yet it is written: “Ask, and it shall be given you.”* I 
search for truth wherever I have hope of finding even a shadow 
of it and still I cannot acknowledge your truth as the eternal truth. 
And yet it is written: “Seek, and ye shall find. Or what man is 
there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a 
Tears come into my eyes as I write this. 1 am moved to the core, 
but I feel I shall not be lost; I shall come to God, for whom my 
whole heart yearns. And this is also a testimony of the Holy Spirit 
and I live and die by it, even if the Bible says the opposite ten 
thousand times over. And don’t deceive yourself, Fritz, you may 
seem to be so sure, but a doubt will come before you know it, and 
the way your heart decides often depends on the merest coinci- 
dence.— But I know from experience that dogmatic faith has no 
influence whatever on one’s inner peace. 
July 27 
If you did what it says in the Bible, you should have nothing 
more to do with me. In the Second Epistle of John (if I’m not 
mistaken) it says that one should not greet the unbeliever, not 
even say yaipe ‘ to him. There are many such passages in the Bible 

and they have always angered me. But you do not do all it says in 
the Bible by a long way. Incidentally when orthodox evangelical 
Christianity is called the religion of love, that sounds to me like 
the most monstrous irony. According to your Christianity, nine- 
tenths of mankind will be eternally unhappy and only one-tenth 
happy. Fritz, and do you call that God’s infinite love? Just think 
how small God would appear if that was what His love amounted 
to. It is therefore clear that if there is a revealed religion, its God 
must indeed be greater than but not different from the one who is 
shown by reason. Otherwise all philosophy is not only empty but 
even sinful. Without philosophy there is no education; without 
education there is no humanity; without humanity, again, there is 
no religion. But even the fanatical Leo does not dare to revile 
philosophy in this way. And that is another of the inconsistencies 
of the orthodox. I could reach an understanding with men like 
Schleiermacher and Neander, for they are consistent and have 
pure hearts. I look in vain for these qualities in the columns of the 
Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung and other pietist journals. Especially 
for Schleiermacher I have enormous respect. If you are consistent" 
you must, of course, consign him to damnation, for he does not 
teach the word of Christ in your sense, but rather in that of 
Young Germany, of Theodor Mundt and Karl Gutzkow. But he 
was a great man, and I only know one man now living who has 
equal intelligence, equal power and equal courage—and that is 
David Friedrich Strauss. 

I was very pleased that you should rise up with such vigour to 
refute me, but one thing made me angry and I shall tell you 
straight out what it is. It is the contempt with which you speak of 
the striving of the rationalists for union with God, of their 
religious life. To be sure, you lie comfortably in your faith as in a 
warm bed, and you know nothing of the fight we have to put up 
when we human beings have to decide whether God is God or not. 
You do not know the weight of the burden one feels with the first 
doubt, the burden of the old belief, when one must decide for or 
against, whether to go on carrying it or to shake it off. But I tell 
you again, you are not so safe from doubt as you think, so do not 
delude yourself with regard to those who doubt. You could 
become one of them yourself, and then you too would ask for fair 
treatment. Religion is an affair of the heart and whoever has a 
heart can be devout; but those whose devoutness is rooted either 
in their understanding or in their reason have none at all. The 
tree of religion sprouts from the heart, overshadows the whole 
man and seeks its nourishment from the air of reason. But its 

To Friedrich Graeber, after July 27, 1839 463 

fruits, which contain the most precious heart-blood, are the 
dogmas, and what goes beyond them is of the Evil one. This is 
what Schleiermacher teaches and I stand by it. 

Adieu, dear Fritz. Think carefully about whether you really want 
to send me to hell and write me my sentence- soon. 

Yours, 
Friedrich Engels