Thus tolerance is one of the great virtues espoused by the Hausfreund and set against arrogance and bigotry. It is extended most noticeably to the Jews. Hebel bases stories on their wiliness and love of profit, but he suggests that those characteristics are not in themselves despicable and that Jews would be no different from everyone else if they were treated fairly and accorded equality as citizens and fellow human beings.

Hebel’s sympathy with the little man might suggest revolutionary leanings. But his political stance is best described as cautiously liberal. He intimates that in a revolution the most unsuitable persons may be appointed to positions of authority (‘A Willing Justice’, p. 150), deplores acts of disloyalty or betrayal, and reports with approval how Napoleon restored law and order to revolutionary France. Like many German liberals at the time, he saw Napoleon not as a warmonger and tyrant but as the bringer of political and social reform. He illustrates the foolishness of rebelling against the given system of authority. Thus Andreas Hofer, celebrated in the Austrian Tyrol as a national hero, is presented in the Schatzkästlein (p. 122) as an obstinate fool who causes unnecessary suffering. In Hebel’s age it was not unnatural to appreciate the value of political stability and to question the wisdom of the mob. His intended audience, citizens of a small state, were involved, as soldiers, victims or onlookers, and with various degrees of enthusiasm or reluctance, in events beyond their control. We do not need to be familiar with the details of each stage of the Napoleonic Wars, or to know, for instance, why Germans became allied with the French, in order to identify with this sense of powerlessness, and to appreciate the need felt in such times to hold fast to basic human values and find security in simple religious faith.

It will be clear that Hebel did not deal with narrowly local matters. The ordinary reader, he wrote, is curious, he wants to hear about things outside his own experience, about events beyond his village, town or state. So he tells of recent historical events and of curious or extraordinary happenings far away from the confines of Baden. He knew that great changes in contemporary Europe could threaten not just political but also moral and religious stability, and so often his stories show that good and admirable qualities remain good and admirable in any circumstances. For all his fascination with man’s weaknesses and quirks Hebel was convinced that there was such a thing as human dignity, an enduring value which could be reconciled with tolerance and good humour.

The publisher of the Schatzkästlein, which went into a second edition in 1818, urged Hebel to prepare another volume of pieces from the Hausfreund after 1811, but in vain. It seems that Hebel was worried that such, often frivolous, things hardly befitted a man of his standing in the church establishment. (Not everyone needed to know that he kept an owl and a tree frog as pets.) The almanac for 1815 had caused him some unpleasantness. One anecdote in it, ‘Pious Advice’ (p. 150), was deemed offensive by the Catholic Church – reacting, perhaps, to attempts (which Hebel deplored) by the agents of the Lutheran almanac to force it upon Catholic households – and the whole almanac for that year had to be reprinted. Hebel’s involvement in the Hausfreund after that would have been minimal but for the fact that a plan to contribute to another calendar fell through, so that the pieces he wrote for that separate venture could make up the volume for 1819. His great concern now was that the churches should work together for the benefit of the people. When in 1818 he was made Prelate of the Lutheran Church in Baden and thus became a member of the Diet in Karlsruhe (this parliament was one of the progressive results of the Napoleonic upheavals) he was concerned mainly with welfare measures to help widows and orphans, the blind and the deaf and dumb, and in this he worked closely with his Catholic counterpart. He also supported moves to liberalize the censorship of publications. His main preoccupation, however, was to bring the two Protestant Churches in Baden closer to each other.

In 1818 he began his Bible stories for children (Biblische Geschichten). They were intended to be used in both Lutheran and Reformed schools, which indeed they were, after their publication in 1824, until 1855. (There were moves in the Catholic hierarchy, much to Hebel’s gratification, to place them in Catholic schools too.) Baden as Grand Duchy included large areas of population in the Reformed Palatinate, and thanks largely to Hebel’s endeavours the Lutheran and Reformed Churches in Baden were united in 1821. He wrote parts of the liturgy which was used for more than thirty years. For this contribution to church history he was awarded an honorary doctorate in theology by the University of Heidelberg.