The Man Who Sees Ghosts by Friedrich von Schiller

Author:Friedrich von Schiller [Friedrich von Schiller]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781908968692
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2014-01-28T16:00:00+00:00

BOOK TWO

NOT LONG AFTER these latter events—Count von O** continues to relate—I began to notice an important change in the Prince’s disposition. Until now the Prince had avoided any close examination of his faith and been content to purify the brutal and materialistic religious notions with which he had been brought up by means of the better ideas which arose in him later; this he did without examining the foundations of his faith. Religious matters altogether, he confessed to me on several occasions, had always seemed to him an enchanted castle into which one does not set foot without some trepidation; one would do far better to pass over the subject with respectful resignation, without running the danger of getting lost in its labyrinths. However, an opposing tendency drew him irresistibly to investigations that were related to it.

A sanctimonious and slavish education was the source of this aversion; it had imprinted on his tender brain nightmare shapes from which, throughout the course of his life, he could never entirely free himself. Religious melancholy was a hereditary disease in his family; the education given to him and his brothers was adapted to this disposition and the people to whom he was entrusted were selected from the same motive, being therefore either fanatics or hypocrites. To suffocate all the boy’s liveliness of spirit beneath stifling stone tablets was the most reliable means of ensuring the unalloyed contentment of the royal parents.

The whole of the Prince’s youth was marked by this dark, night-like character; joy was banished even from his games. All his ideas of religion had something terrifying about them, and it was precisely this, whatever was grisly and coarse, which first seized hold of his lively imagination and survived there longest, too. His God was a gargoyle, a vengeful Being; his reverence of God was the trembling of a slave or a blind submission that smothered all his vitality and sense of adventure. Religion stood there barring the way to all those boyish and youthful inclinations to which his sturdy body and blooming health served to make all the more explosive; it was at loggerheads with everything for which his youthful heart hankered; he came to know it never as a blessing, only as a scourge of his passions. And so a silent rancour against it gradually flared up in his heart, which, along with a reverential faith and blind fear in his head and heart, made for the strangest mixture: a repugnance for a master before whom he felt an equal degree of horror and reverence.

No wonder that he seized the first opportunity to escape from so harsh a yoke—but he fled from it like a bond slave from his cruel master, a slave who even in the midst of liberty still feels the chains about him wherever he goes. This was why—because he did not quietly and freely renounce the faith of his youth, because he had not waited until his maturer reason had slowly freed itself from its

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.