 Bauer’s late writings identified sentiment and pietistic feeling-certainty, rather than autonomous reason, as the principal force in shaping modern subjectivity. His studies of the Quakers and of pietism described passive inwardness and sentiment as the dominant characteristics of the German Enlightenment. The practical reason of Kant and Fichte merely translated the inner voice of pietist conscience into a rationalist idiom. Bauer also described pietism as the end of Christianity, since it destroyed dogma in favour of inner illumination and personal moral rectitude. Consistent with his Christianity Revealed, Bauer continued to define positive or statutory religions by their exclusive dogmas and symbols; and he still saw the general course of history as dissipating these dogmas, as mere illusions. He discounted the mobilizing potential of religion in the modern imperial order. In the Posaune, he had denounced Schleiermacher’s efforts to restore dogmatic Christianity through an appeal to feelings of dependency. Now he claimed that the force of sentiment, contrary to Schleiermacher’s supposition, was to dissolve dogmatic religion into personal conviction. The new world empire would end with the inner erosion of religious belief. Not rational speculation, but sentiment, would effect this transformation.