He never went to church, and avoided any occasion of having to make external display of religious belief. The clergy were very unfavourable to him and though they did not denounce him from the pulpit, as he had never given any cause for scandal, his name was always mentioned with repugnance. A peculiar incident occurred to fan this animosity into a flame, and to involve the aged recluse in an atmosphere of ghostly terror. He possessed a very large library, consisting of works belonging to the eighteenth century. All those philosophical treatises which have exercised a wider influence than Luther and Calvin were to be found in it, and the old bookworm knew them by heart, and eked out a living by lending them to some of his neighbours. The clergy looked upon this as the abomination of desolation, and strictly forbade their flocks to borrow these books. System's lodging was looked upon as a receptacle for every kind of impiety.
I, as a matter of course, looked upon him and his books in the same light, and it was only when my ideas upon philosophy were well consolidated that I came to understand that I had been fortunate enough during my youth to contemplate a truly wise man. I had no difficulty in reconstructing his ideas by piecing together a few words which at the time had appeared to me unintelligible, but which I had remembered. God, in his eyes, was the order of nature, from which all things proceed, and he would not brook contradiction upon this point. He loved humanity as representing reason, and he hated superstition as the negation of reason. Although he had not the poetic afflatus which the nineteenth century has given to these great truths, System, I feel sure, had very high and far-reaching views. He was quite in the right. So far from failing to appreciate the greatness of God, he looked with contempt upon those who believed that they could move Him. Lost in profound tranquillity and unaffected humility, he saw that human error was more to be pitied than hated. It was evident that he despised his age. The revival of superstition, which, he thought, had been buried by Voltaire and Rousseau, seemed to him a sign of utter imbecility in the rising generation.