§ 25. What was the connexion between Pestalozzi’s belief at this season and complete belief in dogmatic Christianity? The question is one that will always be asked and can never, I think, be fully answered. In the days preceding the French Revolution it was a proof of wisdom to “Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt, and cling to Faith,” even though the Faith were “beyond the forms of Faith” (see Tennyson’s _Ancient Sage_). But Pestalozzi did far more than this. He traced all virtue and strength in the people to belief in the Fatherhood of God; and he saw in unbelief the severance of all the bonds of society. The “Hermit” does not indeed use the phrases common among “evangelical” Christians, but that he was indeed a Christian is established not only by the general tone of his aphorisms but still more clearly by his last words: “The Man of God, who with his sufferings and death has restored to humanity the lost feeling of the child’s disposition towards God is the Redeemer of the world; he is the sacrificed Priest of the Lord; he is the Mediator between God and God-forgetting mankind. His teaching is pure justice, educating philosophy of the people; it is the revelation of God the Father to the lost race of his children.”
§ 26. The “Evening Hour” remaining almost unnoticed, Pestalozzi’s friends urged him to write something in a more popular form. So he set to work on a tale which should depict the life of the peasantry and shew the causes of their degradation and the cure. With extraordinary rapidity he wrote between the lines of an old account book the first part of his “Leonard and Gertrude.” The book, which was complete in itself, and through the good offices of Iselin (of the _Ephemerides_), soon found a publisher, suddenly sprang into immense popularity, a popularity of which nothing but the “continuations” could ever have deprived it. In the works of a great artist we see natural objects represented with perfect fidelity and yet with a life breathed into them by genius, which is wanting or at least is not visible to common eyes in the originals. Just so do we find Swiss peasant life depicted by Pestalozzi. The delineation is evidently true to nature; and, at the same time, shows Nature as she reveals herself to genius. But for this work something more than genius was necessary, viz., sympathy and love. In the preface to the first edition, he says, “In that which I here relate, and which I have, for the most part, seen and heard myself in the course of an active life, I have taken care not once to add my own opinion to what I saw and heard the people themselves saying, feeling; believing, judging, and attempting.” In a later edition (1800) he says, “I desired nothing then, and I desire nothing else now, as the object of my life, but the welfare of the people, whom I love, and whom I feel to be miserable as few feel them to be miserable, because I have with them borne their sufferings as few have borne them.”