Those of us with a taste for idle speculation may be tempted to wonder how Goethe would have turned out if he had been born in Munich or Vienna instead of in Protestant Frankfurt and gone to school with the Jesuits. Voltaire, we may recall, was a pupil of theirs; and a certain respect for his old masters never left him. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that in the absence of any direct Catholic contacts in Goethe’s early years it was from Voltaire and the Encyclopedists that he acquired his first notions about the Church. For although the young poet reacted against the French classical tradition in verse which Voltaire represented, he was like the whole age in which he lived deeply influenced by French writings. How far the Voltairean attitude towards the Church in the eighteenth century was justified it is difficult for us to realise in an age happily free from gross ecclesiastical abuses. As we know, Voltaire did not limit himself to attacking abuses. That the period in which Goethe grew up was one in which the Church had largely lost the allegiance of the intellectual world must regrettably be admitted. As for the Protestantism in which the poet was educated, it was a dull and formal affair from which the genuine enthusiasm of the Reformation had long since evaporated, and it was rent by internal dissensions. It could not but be wholly unsatisfying to Goethe's genius; and since the ‘paganism’ of his temperament and the prejudices of his youth prevented him from ever considering Catholicism seriously, he evolved a religion of his own out of the various elements he collected in the course of his reading and experience. In this he was typically modern.