The Virgin birth, the three persons in the
Trinity, and the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in particular, seemed to
me to be remnants of the basest barbarism of antiquity.
Under these circumstances, my young soul, feeling the need of something
it could worship, fled from Asia's to Europe's divinities, from
Palestine to Hellas, and clung with vivid enthusiasm to the Greek world
of beauty and the legends of its Gods. From all the learned education I
had had, I only extracted this one thing: an enthusiasm for ancient
Hellas and her Gods; they were my Gods, as they had been those of
Julian. Apollo and Artemis, Athene and Eros and Aphrodite grew to be
powers that I believed in and rejoiced over in a very different sense
from any God revealed on Sinai or in Emmaus. They were near to me.
And under these circumstances the Antiquities Room at Charlottenburg,
where as a boy I had heard Hoeyen's lectures, grew to be a place that I
entered with reverence, and Thorwaldsen's Museum my Temple, imperfectly
though it reproduced the religious and heroic life and spirit of the
Greeks. But at that time I knew no other, better door to the world of
the Gods than the Museum offered, and Thorwaldsen and the Greeks, from
fourteen to fifteen, were in my mind merged in one. Thorwaldsen's Museum
was to me a brilliant illustration of Homer.
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