Klagenfurt, in the beginning of the year 1794

Honored and sincerely beloved man,

Please don't take offense and do grant me, with your customary good will, the pleasure of writing to you again. For when I write to you I feel the highest pleasure: the feeling of awe and of love for your person – you who ennoble humanity. And I need not prove to you that this is the feeling that makes us blessed, because you had the good fortune to locate for us this purest and most sacred of feelings and to rescue it forever from religious institutions. I must thank you most warmly for “Religion within the Bounds of Reason,” thank you in the name of all who have managed to tear themselves loose from those ensnaring chains of darkness. Do not deprive us of your wise guidance so long as you think that there is still something we lack, for it is not our desire or our satisfaction that can judge what we need but only your perception of us. I felt myself wholly informed by the Critique of Pure Reason, and yet I found that your subsequent works were not in the least superfluous. Gladly would I have commanded the course of nature to stand still if that could assure me that you would have the time you need to complete what you have begun for us, and gladly would I attach the days of my future life to your own if I could thereby know that you were still alive when the end of the French Revolution comes about.