IT SHOULD NOT NECESSARILY SURPRISE US that the earliest critical responses to Werther paid relatively little attention to its religious elements. As Albrecht Schöne observes, the eighteenth century was so steeped in biblical language and imagery that their presence does not necessarily point to religious feeling so much as to feeling itself (1958, 175–76, 248–49). Nevertheless, one might expect orthodox churchmen like Johann Melchior Goeze and Christian Ziegra to be disturbed by Werther's blasphemous appeals to God, not to mention his self-identification with Christ. Their objections, however, center far more on the novel's threat to the church's position on suicide. At least insofar as Protestant orthodoxy is concerned, Roland Barthes is incorrect when he claims that “Religion condemns in Werther not only the suicide but also, perhaps, the lover, the utopian, the class heretic, the man who is ‘ligatured’ to no one but himself” (1977, 210). In England the situation was somewhat different. The first translation, The Sorrows of Werter: a German Story (1779), deliberately elided many of the original's religious references, explaining in the preface that “Werter [sic] appears to have been strongly impressed with sentiments of religion: and it is not to be wondered at, that in his state of mind they should take an irregular form, and sometimes border on extravagance” (quoted by Rose 1931, 148). Even the translator's choice of “sorrows,” rather than “sufferings,” to render Leiden lessens the potential religious effect.