If it is suggested that to explain the Bible by men and nations under its spell is to reason in a circle, the answer is that the biblical vocabulary merely provides a medium of expression for a universal tendency. Claudian, addressing the Emperor Theodosius, wrote:—
O nimium dilecte deo, cui militat æther.
The Egyptian god Ammon, in the great battle epic of Rameses II, assured the monarch:—
Lo, I am with thee, my son; fear not, Ramessu Miammon!
Ra, thy father, is with thee, his hand shall uphold thee in danger,
More am I worth unto thee than thousands and thousands of soldiers.
The preamble to the modern Japanese Constitution declares it to be "in pursuance of a great policy co-extensive with the Heavens and the Earth."
VI[ToC]
Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that "Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather with Japan than with Judæa. For in Japan, too, beneath all the romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater scale of the mediæval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."