the Prussian deity is seen to be in essence merely tribal, one of the deities of the Teutonic mythology - a combination of Odin and Loki dressed in the uniform of Colonel of Pomeranian Grenadiers. This Gott, whom William had for a partner, seems in reality to have been William's double, who approved of the Kaiser's policies, invariably sided with him in war and peace, and, like William, lauded the Germans as the Chosen People. Though their reverence for the Kaiser would have sufficed to make them obey his commands, they were undoubtedly stimulated in their zeal when he told them that Gott thought just as he did. They could neither see nor hear the invisible partner, but the Kaiser's reports of him were too definite, not to say familiar, for them to be skeptical. That William II's Gott should be a pagan of the old Germanic type was inevitable. Two generations of unparalleled devotion to scientific research and metaphysics had left Germany pagan and materialist. The stirring of atavistic instincts in her, through the rediscovery by the historians of medieval Germany and their magnification of the glories of medieval Hohenstaufen, Saxon, and Suabian monarchs, turned German attention back still further, to the time before Christianity had replaced their pagan religion. In a passage of singularly imaginative insight, the late J. A. Cramb surveyed swiftly the fourteen centuries during which the Germans called themselves Christians. There was, he says, no real Christian spirit in their hearts. Their religion was the religion of valor, of war, of killing and being killed, of making physical courage the final test of life, and its attainment the only aim worthy of men. But Christ preached a different religion — the religion of righteousness, of brotherhood, of self-sacrifice, and of mercy. The war to which he called his followers was of the spirit, and spiritual was the test which he applied to conduct; not to kill, but to heal; not to hate, but to love; not to oppress, or cheat, or persecute others, but to do unto them as you would be done by those were the ideals which Christ opposed to the religion of Odin, the War-God. Cramb puts into the mouth of latter-day Germany this summary: Judæa and Galilee cast their dreary spell over Greece and Rome, when Greece and Rome were already sinking into decrepitude and the creative power in them was exhausted, when weariness and bitterness wakened with their greatest spirits at day and sank to sleep again with them at night. But Judæa and Galilee struck Germany in the splendor and heroism of her prime. Germany and the whole Teutonic people in the fifth century made the great error. They conquered Rome, but, dazzled by Rome's authority, they adopted the religion and the culture of the vanquished. Germany's own deep religious instinct, her native genius for religion, manifested in her creative success, was arrested, stunted, thwarted. But having once adopted the new faith, she strove to live that faith, and for more than thirty generations she has struggled and wrestled to see with eyes that were not her eyes, to worship a God that was not her God, to live with a world-vision that was not her vision, and to strive for a heaven that was not her heaven. But struggle as she might, Germany found Christianity an alien religion. By the Reformation she freed herself from it in its most rigid theological discipline: and then she chafed at Protestantism. Her philosophers, from Kant to Nietzsche, pulled down one after another the pillars on which rested what remained of Christianity. Nietzsche freed Germany from the last trammels of Christian tradition. Nietzsche clears away the "accumulated rubbish" of twelve hundred years [says Cramb, speaking for Germany]. He attempts to set the German imagination back where it was with Alaric and Theodoric, fortified by the experience of twelve centuries to confront the darkness unaided, unappalled, triumphant, great and free. . . . And what is the religion, which, on the whole, may be characterized as the religion of the most earnest and passionate minds of young Germany? In the newer Imperative ring the accents of an earlier, greater prime, the accents heard by the Scamander, which even at Charonea did not entirely die away: Ye have heard how in old times it was said, Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth; but I say unto you, Blessed are the valiant, for they shall make the earth their throne. And ye have heard men say, Blessed are the poor in spirit; but I say unto you, Blessed are the great in soul and the free in spirit, for they shall enter into Valhalla. And ye have heard men say, Blessed are the peacemakers; but I say unto you, Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall be called, if not the children of Jahve, the children of Odin,,who is greater than Jahve.1 Such is the religion, described in flinty phrases by one who more than half believed in it, which Germany has been waiting for fifteen centuries to force upon the world at the point of her sword." The deity who presides over this 1 J. A. Cramb: Germany and England (London: John Murray, 1914), pp. 113, 114, 116, 117. 2 The suspicion that the Germans would relapse to their primitive barbaric ideals, has haunted more than one of their writers. Heine expressed this in a memorable passage, from which these sentences are taken: "Christianity and this is its most beautiful service has subdued to some extent that German brutal desire for combat, and if the restraining Talisman, the Cross, falls to pieces, then the ferocity of the old fighters will break out, the senseless - |