VII
DAVID FRIEDRICH STRAUS-THE MAN AND HIS FATE
IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND STRAUSS ONE MUST LOVE HIM. HE WAS NOT THE greatest, and not the deepest, of theologians, but he was the most absolutely sincere. His insight and his errors were alike the insight and the errors of a prophet. And he had a prophet's fate. Disappointment and suffering gave his life its consecration. It unrolls itself before us like a tragedy, in which, in the end, the gloom is lightened by the mild radiance which shines forth from the nobility of the sufferer.
Strauss was born in 1808 at Ludwigsburg. His father was a merchant, whose business, however, was unsuccessful, so that his means steadily declined. The boy took his ability from his mother, a good, self-controlled, sensible, pious woman, to whom he raised a monument in his "Memorial of a Good Mother" written in 1858, to be given to his daughter on her confirmation-day.
From 1821 to 1825 he was a pupil at the "lower seminary" at Blaubeuren, along with Friedrich Vischer, Pfizer, Zimmermann, Marklin, and Binder. Among their teachers was Ferdinand Christian Baur, whom they were to meet with again at the university.
His first year at the university was uninteresting, as it was only in the following year that the reorganisation of the theological faculty took place, in consequence of the appointment of Baur. The instruction in the philosophical faculty was almost equally unsatisfactory, so that the friends would have gained little from the two years of philosophical propaedeutic which formed part of the course prescribed for theological students, if they had not combined to prosecute their philosophical studies for themselves. The writings of Hegel began to exercise a power ful influence upon them. For the philosophical faculty, Hegel's philosophy was as yet non-existent.
These student friends were much addicted to poetry. Two
