 Throughout the 1830s, however, Bauer sought to reconcile thought and being through the idea of rational faith. In Zeitschrift für spekulative Theologie, which he edited between 1836 and 1838, and in Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik, he offered a speculative account of Christian doctrines as exemplifications of logical categories. In the 1838 Religion of the Old Testament, Bauer depicted religious experience as a product of self-consciousness. He proposed both a transcendental account, stressing the conditions of possibility of religious experiences, and a phenomenological sequence of their forms: a legalistic subordination to an authoritarian deity in the early books of the Old Testament expressed a merely external relation between God and man, while the messianic consciousness of later books heralded a higher form, the immanence of the universal in the community; but this consciousness could only point up the inadequacy of the law, not yet propose the effective overcoming of estrangement. The texts of the 1830s located the logical structure which, for Bauer, defined the religious consciousness: the immediate identity between particularity, whether of a subject or a community, and the abstract universal, a unity achieved without self-transformation. By 1839, Bauer deduced the political implications of this view: the religious consciousness asserted this immediate identity as a monopolistic, sectarian claim, excluding other particulars from equivalent status. The essence of religion for Bauer was now a hubristic particularism, which also conferred a transcendent status on the universal, as a realm divorced from concrete social relationships. This position received its fullest exposition in Bauer’s Christianity Revealed (1843). He already sketched this argument in Herr Dr. Hengstenberg, of 1839, publicly breaking with orthodox and conservative versions of Christianity, and stressing the discontinuity between Christianity and Judaism. By 1840–41, Bauer would present the emancipated philosophical self-consciousness as opposed to all forms of religious representation. His political radicalism and republicanism were cemented by his recognition of the structural identity between the private interests fostered by the Restoration order, and the monopolistic religious consciousness.