28 HAECKEL 



born, on February 12, 1834. The sister came from 

 the grave to attend the mother of the new-born 

 child. A little fact of that character seems 

 to pour out a broad stream of light. The religious 

 sense was strong in the Sethes, but it was not of 

 the rigid conventional character. It came from 

 the depths of human destinies, of individual 

 experience. In those depths it is always found 

 associated with that other fundamental quality 

 of human experience and inner life — a zeal for 

 the truth. Schleiermacher, the Good, had endea- 

 voured within the limits of his time (if not of our 

 time) to erect a new and firmer Christendom. 

 Darwinism might very well have adjusted itself to 

 this new Christendom, that needed no record of 

 miracles from disputed historical works to support 

 it, but sought the holiest ideal prophetically in the 

 symbolic conception and the development of the 

 true, the good, and the beautiful. Had Schleier- 

 macher read the Natural History of Creation, or 

 later theologians shared his temper, one wonders 

 how much exaggeration and bitterness might have 

 been spared on either side. But religion was not 

 prepared to dissociate itself from '^ the Church," 

 and with the Church there could be no compromise. 

 Thus one's thoughts travelled from the radiolaria in 

 Haeckel's latest publication and the old bust of 

 Schleiermacher, which was protected by its glass 

 shade, in this home of old-world piety, from the 

 wicked flies of the twentieth century. 



An elder sister of Bertha Sethe and daughter 

 of the old Christoph Sethe had married the much 



