THE CHURCH IN GERMANY
There have been those who have claimed that the two great blessings bestowed upon the world by Germany are the invention of printing by Gutenberg, which emanated from Mayence in 1436, and the Reformation started by Luther at Wittenberg in 1517. The statement may be open to criticism, but it is hazarded nevertheless. As to how really religious the Germans have always been, one has but to recall Schiller's "Song of the Bell." Certainly a people who lay such stress upon opening the common every-day life with prayer must always have been devoted to religion.
The question of the religious tenets of Germany is studiously avoided in this book, as far as making comparisons between the Catholic and Protestant religions is concerned.
At the finish of the "Thirty Years' War," North Germany had become almost entirely[{30}] Protestant, and many of the former bishops' churches had become by force of circumstances colder and less attractive than formerly, even though many of the Lutheran churches to-day keep up some semblance of high ceremony and altar decorations. It is curious, however, that many of these churches are quite closed to the public on any day but Sunday or some of the great holidays.
In the Rhine provinces the Catholic faith has most strongly endured. In the German Catholic cathedrals the morning service from half-past nine to ten is usually a service of much impressiveness, and at Cologne, beloved of all stranger tourists, nones, vespers, and compline are sung daily with much devotion.
The ecclesiastical foundation in Germany is properly attributable to monkish influences. Between the Rhine and the Baltic there were no cities before the time of Charlemagne, although the settlements established there by the Church for the conversion of the natives were the origin of the communities from which sprang the great cities of later years.
The monkish orders were ever a powerful body of church-builders, and north of[{31}] the Alps in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, even though they were the guardians of literature as well as of the arts, the monks were possessed of an energy which took its most active form in church-building.
Whatever may have been the origin of the later Romanesque church-building, whether it was indigenous to Lombard Italy or not, it was much the same in Spain, France, England, and Germany, though it took its most hardy form in Germany, perhaps with the cathedral of Speyer (1165-90), which is one of the latest Romanesque structures, contemporary with the early Gothic of France. In Italy, and elsewhere along the Mediterranean, the pure Romanesque was somewhat diluted by the Byzantine influence; but northward, along the course of the Rhine, the Romanesque influence had come to its own in a purer form than it had in Italy itself.
Here it may be well to mention one pertinent fact of German history, in an attempt to show how, at one time at least, Church and state in Germany were more firmly bound together than at present.
The Germanic Empire, founded by Charlemagne in the year 800, was dissolved[{32}] under Francis II., who, in 1806, exchanged the title of Emperor of Germany for that of Emperor of Austria, confining himself to his hereditary dominions.