'We see here that the superficiality and ingnorance of the speculating founder of a new religion is transformed into very pronounced cowardice. Herr Daumer flees the historic tragedy that is threatening him too closely to alleged nature, ie to mere rustic idyll, and preaches the cult of the female to cloak his own effeminate resignation.
Herr Daumer's cult of nature, by the way, is a peculiar one. He has managed to be reactionary even in comparison with Christianity. He tries to establish the old pre-Christian natural religion in a modernised form.
...
We see that this cult of nature is limited to Sunday walks of an inhabitant of a small provincial town who childishly wonders at the cukoo laying its eggs in another bird's nest, at tears being designed to keep the surface of the eyes moist, and so on. There is no question, of course of modern sciences, which, with modern industry, have revolutionised the whole of nature and put an end to man's childish attitude to nature as well as to other forms of childishness ... For the rest it would be desirable that Bavaria's sluggish peasant economy, the ground on which priests and Daumers likewise grow, should at last be ploughed up by modern cultivation and modern machines.'
(Quoted in Alfred Schmidt, The Concept of nature in Marx, p 131-3)