“Resolutely pagan” in religion and morals, he had no sense of sin, felt no need of a god dying to atone for him,58 and resented all talk of the cross. He wrote to Lavater, August 9, 1782: “I am no anti-Christian, no un-Christian, but very decidedly a non-Christian. … You accept the Gospel, as it stands, as divine truth. Well, no audible voice from heaven would convince me that a woman bears a child without a man, and that a dead man arises from the grave.
