¶ Bismarck’s career affords a classical instance, in these poor times, of what a strong man, with faith in himself and his cause, can do against all manner of obstacles.
Faith in himself was the essence of his power. Over and over, he made clear that he regarded himself in God’s hands, doing God’s work, but on what specific evidence he based this profound conclusion no human being knows beyond Bismarck’s own assertion. However, that power urged him on. Naturally, in turn, the fire kindled by faith in himself at last stimulated faith in a people, numbering some twenty-five millions; a people who in the main had up to this time been political atheists to Bismarck’s dogma of a United Germany. This idea of faith is a fact of such vast import that we dare not pass it lightly by.
¶ By an almighty wave of faith in themselves the German people ceased playing the political craven; came out boldly for what they hold to be their too long deferred birthright!
Here, the mental attitude of the German people passes beyond the dogmas of politics or social intercourse whatsoever; it merges into a mysterious world of reality, close and near yet baffling to describe; expressing itself in an invincible National faith, now about to burst forth, at last, and sweep all before it!
¶ This mental phenomenon exists in various forms, but the animating impulse is ever the same.
The hymn-singing of Charles and John Wesley, whose appeals to religious emotionalism filled the fields of England with tens of thousands of weeping, shouting men and women, vastly excited as to the state of their souls, is a type of faith beginning in a small way and attaining National proportions. No historian could write adequately the history of England without crediting great changes to the work of the Wesley psalm-singers; women tearing off their jewels; men rising in the multitude and calling on God to witness that henceforth their lives would be pure and unsullied by sin; while under the excitement murderers came forward and confessed crimes known only to themselves.
¶ Oh, this German National faith that Frederick the Great so gloriously began; that Louise fostered and sustained; that the poet Arndt set to hymns; that the great von Humboldt in his own peculiar way saw from afar; that the German students apostrophied; that William III figured to himself in his church-building; that von Stein discerned vaguely; that William I emphasized in his cold-blooded, clear-eyed manner of the soldier; that von Sybel fought for; that scores, nay, hundreds and thousands of noble men and women, utterly apart from political chicanery, did indeed long for with all the fervor of their earnest God-fearing German nature; Bismarck stands in the centre, here and now!
¶ It is true that he is not as yet accepted, but he is biding his time; he is looked on with suspicion, but he fronts the scorn of the rabble, in the end to beat the doubters into submission, against their own will.