The consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in and through that consciousness He has accomplished, especially in language and religion, this was from the earliest time before my mind.  After having awhile fancied to attain my point, sometimes here, sometimes there, at length (it was in the Christmas holidays of 1812, after having gained the prize in November) I made a general and comprehensive plan.  I wished to go through and represent heathen antiquity, in its principal phases, in three great periods of the world’s history, according to its languages, its religious conceptions, and its political institutions; first of all in the East, where the earliest expressions in each are highly remarkable, although little known; then in the second great epoch, among the Greeks and Romans; thirdly, among the Teutonic nations, who put an end to the Roman Empire.

At first I thought of Christianity only as something which every one, like the mother tongue, knows intuitively, and therefore not as the object of a peculiar study.  But in January 1816, when I for the last time took into consideration all that belonged to my plan, and wrote it down, I arrived at this conclusion, that as God had caused the conception of Himself to be developed in the mind of man in a twofold manner, the one through revelation to the Jewish people through their patriarchs, the other through reason in the heathen; so also must the inquiry and representation of this development be twofold; and as God had kept these two ways for a length of time independent and separate, so should we, in the course of the examination, separate knowledge from man, and his development from the doctrine of revelation and faith, firmly trusting that God in the end would bring about the union of both.  This is now also my firm conviction, that we must not mix them or bring them together forcibly, as many have done with well-meaning zeal but unclear views, and as many in Germany with impure designs are still doing.

The design had its interruptions, both intellectual and practical.  The plan was an ambitious one, too ambitious for Bunsen’s time and powers, or even probably for our own more advanced stage of knowledge; and Bunsen ever found it hard to resist the attractions of a new object of interest, and did not always exhaust it, though he seldom touched anything without throwing light on it.  Thus he was drawn by circumstances to devote a good deal of time, more than he intended, to the mere antiquarianism of Rome.  By and by he found himself succeeding Niebuhr as the diplomatic representative of Prussia at Rome.  And his attempt to meet the needs of his own strong devotional feelings by giving more warmth and interest to the German services at the embassy, “the congregation on the Capitoline Hill,” led him, step by step, to those wider schemes for liturgical reform which influenced so importantly the course of his fortunes.  They brought him, a young and