 In a short essay published 1842, in which he sought to clarify the difference between his own approach to the philosophy of religion and Hegel’s, Feuerbach suggested that this difference is most evident in the relations in which each of them stands to Schleiermacher, who famously defined religion as the feeling of utter dependence. Whereas Hegel had “rebuked” Schleiermacher for abdicating the truth-claims of the Christian faith by taking the articles of faith as expressions of this feeling, Feuerbach says he does so only because Schleiermacher was prevented by his “theological prejudice” from drawing the unavoidable conclusion that, “if feeling is subjectively what religion is chiefly about, then God is objectively nothing but the essence of feeling” (B 230). These comments fail to acknowledge that, in The Essence of Christianity Feuerbach had conceived of God as an alienated projection of the human species-essence, which was said to include not only feeling, but reason and will, as well. They nevertheless reflect Feuerbach’s generally overlooked deployment against Hegel of resources derived from the philosophies of feeling of Schleiermacher and  Jacobi,[12]  and they indicate the direction in which his thinking about religion continued to move after the publication of The Essence of Christianity, namely, away from an emphasis on species-consciousness conceived along Hegelian lines, and toward what Van Harvey has aptly referred to as the “naturalist-existentialist” themes that predominate in his later writings on religion (cf. Harvey 1995), which are discussed in  Section 6  below.