Nothing at first glance seems more incongruous than to link the atheistic Jacobsen with the seeming piety of the Stunden-Buch, itself an outcome of the ineradicable experience of Russia as Rilke saw it. Russia was the motivation for his hitherto most feverish quest for God. It was not the calm acceptance of the “Geschichten vom lieben Gott,” which originated simultaneously with the Buch vom mönchischen Leben, but a frenzied search for a God who was to be adequate for all the future and who could be built anew by all the artists of the ages to come. Rilke's ubiquitous God is more pantheistic than he is evolutionary; being in all things, he cannot be used up by successive generations as an anthropomorphic God is. It was Ellen Key's mistake to interpret Rilke's conception of God as a finality, on the basis of the “Geschichten vom lieben Gott,” which had been dedicated to her, and to imply that he was evolutionary as Jacobsen the evolutionist had interpreted him, at the very time that Rilke's whole intensity was concentrated on his God of the future. The “Geschichten vom lieben Gott” and the “Stunden-Buch” supplement each other and should never have been considered one without the other. Rilke's God of the future does not nullify the God of the past, and there is really no contradiction for Rilke in the idea of an evolutionary God, an eternal God, and one who is to be built by all the generations to come. God is like our ancestors who have gone before us: “Und doch sind sie, diese Langvergangenen, in uns, als Anlage, als Last auf unserem Schicksal, als Blut, das rauscht, und als Gebärde, das aufsteigt aus den Tiefen der Zeit.”