It is well known that after Hegel’s death in 1831, his followers soon split into left, centre and right factions over the issue of religion. A dispute over an appropriately Hegelian philosophical attitude to religion had been sparked by the publication in 1835–6 of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus Critically Examined—the conservative right claiming that Hegelianism reflected Christian orthodoxy, the left seeing it as a humanistic doctrine concerning the historical emancipation of mankind. In fact the implications of Hegel’s philosophy for religious belief had been contentious since his rise to prominence in the 1820s. While officially declaring that philosophy and religion had the same content—God—Hegel claimed that the conceptual form of philosophy dealt with this concept in a more developed way than that which was achievable in the imagistic representational form of religion. Many opponents were suspicious that the concept of God was emptied of its proper meaning in the process of Hegel’s philosophical translations and Hegel was suspected by some of pantheism or atheism. Ultimately, then, the source of the corrosive effects of Hegel’s philosophy on religion indeed could appear to be the insistence that the content of religious belief, like everything else, be grounded on rational, in fact logical, considerations—the logical coherence of the system of philosophy itself—rather than on anything like revelation.