Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume One).djvu/57

 tone of talk. On the other hand, he made no effort to hold me by means of counteracting influences to strict adherence to the faith. From the pulpit as well as in private religious instruction I had repeatedly heard the priest say that the Catholic religion was the only saving one, and that all of different belief—Protestants, Jews and heathen—were hopelessly doomed to everlasting hell-fire. There was not a single Protestant in Liblar; in fact, we children could hardly imagine what a “Calvinist,” as the Protestants were called, was like; and when one day a stranger, a Prussian official, passed through our village and we heard that he was a Protestant, we looked at him with a mixture of pity and fear, and were much surprised to find him a man of dignity and agreeable presence. How could he be cheerful? we wondered; for, of course, he too must know of his doom. There was one Jew in the village, a butcher who supplied the neighborhood with meat. In no other way did we come into contact with him. But I saw sometimes in our house another Jew by the name of Aaron, who lived in a neighboring village, and I observed that my father always talked with him in a friendly and interested way upon various subjects. This astonished me. But my father told me that old Aaron, whose face had always appeared to me very serious and of great dignity, was not only a very good and honest, but also a very enlightened, even a wise, man—more honest and virtuous and wise than many a Christian. The question whether so good a man as old Aaron must necessarily be doomed to eternal hell-fire troubled me very much. I could not make this agree with my idea of the all-just God. Soon my father read to me Lessing's “Nathan der Weise,” setting before me the lesson of tolerance which this dramatic poem so attractively teaches, and which I most heartily enjoyed, without being conscious how dangerously those teachings shook