Crossword-Solution: ABERGLAUBE 10 letters, 2 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 15

Goethe admirably remarks: "_Superstition_ is the poetry of life; the poet therefore suffers no harm from being _superstitious_." (Aberglaube.) Superstition and idolatry are an expenditure of emotion of a kind and degree which the true facts would not warrant; poetry when least superstitious is a like exercise of the emotions in order to raise and enhance them; superstition when most poetical unconsciously effects the same thing.

Thus his pages are valuable to the student of superstition, because they contain 'the clash of the country' for about forty years, and illustrate the rural or ecclesiastical aberglaube of our ancestors, at the moment when witchcraft was ceasing to be a recognised criminal offence.

And for him, as for the great majority of searching men, the more the mists of pious _aberglaube_ lift, the more real, the more fair, and the more divine becomes the Face of that living Christ, the more close the sense of His companionship.

But why extend the gruesome list? In view of their mad fury, so fatal to their benefactors, one is tempted to exclaim: _Unglaube du bist nicht so viel ein ungeheuer als aberglaube du!_ "Of the twin monsters, unbelief and superstition, the more to be dreaded is the last!" In China if a man falls in the street, the priest and Levite consult their own safety by keeping at a distance; and if a good Samaritan stoops to pick him up it is at his peril.

For the object of faith in the ethical sense Arnold coined the phrase: 'The Eternal not ourselves which makes for righteousness.' So soon as we go beyond this, we enter upon the region of fanciful anthropomorphism, of extra belief, _aberglaube_, which always revenges itself.