'If you ask me,' says the Protestenblatt, Number 18, 'how shall I build up the kingdom of God,' my answer is: 'Be a good German! Stand fast by the Fatherland. Do your duty and fill your mission. Seek to submerge yourself in German spirit, in German mind. Be German in piety and will, which simply means, be true, faithful, and valiant. Help as best you can towards our victory; help to make our Fatherland grow and wax mighty.'[11]
It is true that there are Protestants in Germany who will not accept the 'Fatherland' as God and eternal life or as a life continued in the memories of later generations, as a Hessian peasant put it in a letter written from the Front. His attitude shows how barren all this rhetoric seems to the unhappy soldier who must obey. Those who knew the lives of truly religious Germans before the war must believe that these arrogant, feverish, diabolical utterances do not represent them. The Lutheran households where the fear of God and the love of one's neighbour reigned cannot have entirely disappeared; the old Christian spirit must fill some hearts. But here is a man, a Lutheran divine, whose pious books have 'circulated in the Army in millions of copies.' He is a very great clergyman; if you saw him in the streets of Lübeck, or Hamburg, or Berlin, many hats would be raised; even officers in the Army would greet him with respect. He is Geheimkonsistorialrath! 'Likewise,' he writes, in his book, Strong in the Lord—'the blessings of the Reformation are at stake. Shall French ungodliness, shall Russian superstition, shall English hypocrisy rule the world? Never! For the blessing of our faith, for the freedom of our conscience, for our Germanism and for our Gospel, we shall fight and struggle and make every sacrifice. Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott. And, if the world were full of devils, we shall maintain our Empire!'
According to Dr. Conrad, Germany is a great surgeon. She must cut; she must even kill, if necessary, the nation that stands in the way of her beneficient Kultur!
So strenuously has the name of Martin Luther been made use of by these fanatics, that the fact is lost sight of in Germany, that the question is not one of religion. There is scarcely a war even in modern times with which religion had so little to do as this; but to hear these shriekers from the pulpit, one would think that Martin Luther was the instigator of the war and that the Kaiser is his prophet! What the Catholic population in Germany—in Bavaria, in Silesia—what the Jews in Berlin and Munich think of all this, we have not yet discovered. A Cardinal holding the standard of Luther, with two Rabbis gracefully toying with its gilded tassels is a sight the preachers offer to us when they appeal to Luther as the representative of Germany. Luther was no democrat; he would scarcely have approved of President Wilson's speeches; but yet he would not have worshipped the trinity of the Kaiser, the Crown Prince and the Prussian Holy Ghost as the Godhead!
Think of the tremendous force that must have perverted these 'men of God!' Who can help believing in the miracle of the swine driven into the sea after this, or in the old Latin adage, 'Whom the Gods wish to destroy, they first make mad,' or in Shakespeare's 'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds?' Religion is made a mark to cover avarice and arrogant ambition, Christianity, to veil a god more material than the Golden Calf.
The learned Danes answered the shrieks of the preachers, and the specious reasonings of such scientists as Wilhelm von Bode, Wundt, Richard Dehmel, Wilhelm Röntgen, Ernest Haeckel, Sudermann, etc., with dead silence, erudition and art had been corrupted. 'In Italy,' Christopher Nyrop,[12] the Dane, says, 'which, when the manifesto of the German learned appeared, was not among the belligerent States, the amazement and the disappointment were so great that the ninety-three signers, "representatives of German Kultur," were named Verräter der deutschen Kultur, traitors to German Kultur.' It was only necessary to change 'Vertreter' to 'Verräter.' And among them were Max Reinhart, Harnack, Gerhard Hauptmann, Siegfried Wagner!
The wonder and amazement were even greater when there was no protest from the Catholics or the Lutherans of Germany against the inexcusable outrage on Louvain or Rheims. The remonstrances of the Pope were unheeded. It was the policy of the German Government to suppress them as far as possible. It wanted to give the impression that the Holy Father was theirs, and too many thoughtless persons fell in with this idea. That the German Catholics were misinformed by [Bethmann-Hollweg] and the War Office makes their position worse.
The proofs offered by the Dean of the Cathedral of Rheims proved that this horror, the destruction of the sacred symbol of the French nation, was not 'a military necessity.'