7. The Deus ex Machina

7. The Deus ex Machina.7. Der Deus ex Machina.

We conceded in what went before that the whole region of our feelings is of a double-meaning nature, and that precisely in the midst of the happiness even of our highest and most spiritual enjoyments stirrings of a quite opposite nature most easily steal upon us. Only too often, in the time of our liveliest youthful feelings, an affection between the sexes puts on the mask of religious feelings; a heart easily deceived takes its unsatisfied longing for a love of a higher and divine kind, and the fair appearance vanishes when that longing has received its long-loved object.^* Those so-called awakenings which take place in the time of lively youth are therefore only seldom of long endurance, the less so the more striking and brilliant the appearances accompanying them have been;^** the better sense seems not really to have been awake, but only to have spoken in its sleep, and the old state of quiet sleep sets in again all the more firmly as soon as that time of the liveliest inclinations and feelings is past. Those devout souls who, through a quite particular liveliness and inwardness of heart, were especially often carried away into the depth of a religious rapture were, as already mentioned, on the other side also precisely the most exposed to the torments of the most violent sensual temptations,^* or upon that rapture there followed a dryness and forsakenness by all spiritual feeling that went as far as the deepest faintness.^**

* Stilling’s Theobald, oder die Schwärmer, part 1, p. 115; part 2, p. 15, 18, 20, 82, and so on.