All his time was spent in preaching, confessing, visiting the sick, relieving the poor.
No one ever thought of confessing sin, for instance, to a river.
Hegel the tourist - recalling happy days spent together; confessing that, were it not because of his sense of duty as a traveller, he would rather be at home, dividing his time between his books and his wife; commenting on the shop windows at Vienna; describing the straw hats of the Parisian ladies - is a contrast to the professor of a profound philosophical system.
In the centre the colossal statue of Luther rises, on a pedestal at the base of which are sitting figures of Peter Waldo, Wycliffe, Hus and Savonarola, the heralds of the Reformation; at the corners of the platform, on lower pedestals, are statues of Luther's contemporaries, Melanchthon, Reuchlin, Philip of Hesse, and Frederick the Wise of Saxony, between which are allegorical figures of Magdeburg (mourning), Spires (protesting) and Augsburg (confessing).
Though, in accounting for the anger of the gods, no sharp distinction is made between moral offences and a ritualistic oversight or neglect, yet the stress laid in the hymns and prayers, as well as in the elaborate atonement ritual prescribed in order to appease the anger of the gods, on the need of being clean and pure in the sight of the higher powers, the inculcation of a proper aspect of humility, and above all the need of confessing one's guilt and sins without any reserve - all this bears testimony to the strength which the ethical factor acquired in the domain of the religion.
