Does a German-American in this country who has placed a mortgage on his house think when he fails to pay the interest or principal of the mortgage that the man who has sold him out was sent by God?
This calls to mind one of the great failures of the war—the failure of religion in the German Empire. I attended a great service, in the Protestant cathedral of Berlin, held to celebrate the five hundredth anniversary of the occasion when the first Hohenzollern, having foreclosed his mortgage, entered into possession of Brandenburg. The Emperor sat in an elevated gallery and across the great cathedral Dr. Dryander, the Court preacher, mounted the pulpit to deliver an eulogy on the Hohenzollern rule and the Hohenzollerns.
What an opportunity then if Dr. Dryander, lifting an accusing finger, had spoken of the rivers of innocent blood sacrificed to the Prussian Moloch of conquest, if he had demanded in the name of Christianity that the barbarities of Prussian rule should cease, that the Belgian workingmen, dragged from their homes to manufacture shells to be used against their own brothers, sons and fathers in Prussian factories, should be sent back; if he had demanded that the twenty thousand women and girls driven into worse than slavery from Lille and Tourcoing and Roubaix in the North of France should be given their freedom once more; if he had spoken of the whole nation of the Armenians, of the Syrians, of the Jews, massacred by the Turks while the German Generals in command of the Turkish armies stood by; if he had denounced the invasion of Belgium, the breaking of treaties, the starvation of Poland, the horrors of poisoned gas and the cruelties exercised upon those of the opposing armies unfortunate enough to become prisoners of the Germans.
But no, Dr. Dryander droned on. No pastor in Germany has dared to risk his state-paid salary to stand up for Christianity and the right.
The Prussians cannot get away from the belief that they have a sort of personal God who takes a direct and kindly interest in their destinies, especially in the ordering of their bloody battles. Countless sermons were preached through Germany during the war, but the most ridiculous was that of a Protestant pastor in Berlin early in the war. He announced the title of his sermon as, "Is God neutral?", and in his fourteenthly proved to his own satisfaction, that the Deity, abandoning neutrality, had declared Himself unequivocally for the success of German arms!
CHAPTER XXII
THAT INTERVIEW WITH THE KAISER
After the appearance, in August, 1917, in the Philadelphia Public Ledger and other newspapers in America and the Telegraph in England of the message of the Kaiser to President Wilson, the official North German Gazette, evidently unaware of the fact that the original message of the Kaiser in his own hand was in my possession, published the following:
"The London Daily Telegraph publishes from the memoirs of former Ambassador Gerard a telegram that His Majesty the Kaiser is alleged to have sent to President Wilson on August 10, 1914, and in which the events before the participation of England in the present war are set forth.