Johann Gottlieb Fichte held the philosophy chair at Jena, the intellectual center of early German Idealism, until a controversy over a single 1798 essay ended his university career there. Fichte had argued, in an essay on the grounds of belief in a divine world governance, that God should not be conceived as a separate, personal being who exists as one object alongside others, since anything that exists in that ordinary sense is finite and conditioned, but rather as the living, moral world order itself, the very structure by which the moral law governs reality. To many readers this sounded less like a refinement of theism than a denial of a personal God altogether, an accusation Fichte's own defense, that a God who is an object among objects is not the infinite God theology actually needs, did not fully dispel. The Saxon government formally accused him of atheism, other German states threatened to bar his writings from their territories, and in 1799, after a public dispute that drew in figures across German intellectual life, Fichte resigned rather than accept a court ordered reprimand, the episode German historians call the Atheismusstreit, the atheism dispute. He continued developing his philosophy afterward with an increasingly religious vocabulary, but the Jena chair that made German Idealism's early reputation passed to Schelling, and Fichte's own path away from it shaped how carefully his successors, Hegel very much included, chose their words when writing about God.