"I saw that my statement unless modified would result in an embarrassing investigation. 'I have never read the Christian Bible,' I said, 'but my mother must have read it for when as a child I visited her she quoted to me long passages from the Bible.'
"His Majesty smiled in a pleased fashion. 'That is it,' he said, 'women are essentially religious by nature, because they are trusting and obedient. It was a mistake to attempt to stamp out religion. It is the doctrine of obedience. Therefore I shall revive religion, but it shall be a religion of obedience to the House of Hohenzollern. The God of the Hebrews declared them to be his chosen people. But they proved a servile and mercenary race. They traded their swords for shekels and became a byword and a hissing among the nations--and they were scattered to the four corners of the earth. I shall revive that God. And this time he shall chose more wisely, for the Germans shall be his people. The idea is not mine. William the Great had that idea, but the revolution swept it away. It shall be revived. We shall have a new Bible, based upon the old one, a third dispensation, to replace the work of Moses and Jesus. And I too shall be a lawgiver--I shall speak the word of God.'"
Hellar paused; a smile crept over his face. Then he laughed softly and to himself--but Dr. Zimmern only shook his head sadly.
"Yes, I wrote the book," continued Hellar. "It required four years, for His Majesty was very critical, and did much revising. I had a long argument with him over the question of retaining Hell. I was bitterly opposed to it and represented to His Majesty that no religion had ever thrived on fear of punishment without a corresponding hope of reward. 'If you are to have no Heaven,' I insisted, 'then you must have no Hell.'
"'But we do not need Heaven,' argued His Majesty, 'Heaven is superfluous. It is an insult to my reign. Is it not enough that a man is a German, and may serve the House of Hohenzollern?'
"'Then why,' I asked, 'do you need a Hell?' I should have been shot for that but His Majesty did not see the implication. He replied coolly:
"'We must have a Hell because there is one way that my subjects can escape me. It is a sin of our race that the Eugenics Office should have bred out--but they have failed. It is an inborn sin for it is chiefly committed by our children before they come to comprehend the glory of being German. How else, if you do not have a Hell in your religion, can you check suicide?'
"Of course there was logic in his contention and so I gave in and made the Children's Hell. It is a gruesome doctrine, that a child who kills himself does not really die. It is the one thing in the whole book that makes me feel most intellectually unclean for writing it. But I wrote it and when the book was finished and His Majesty had signed the manuscript, for the first time in over a century we printed a bible on a German press. The press where the first run was made we named 'Old Gutenberg.'"
"Gutenberg invented the printing press," explained Zimmern, fearing I might not comprehend.
"Yes," said Hellar with a curling lip, "and Gutenberg was a German, and so am I. He printed a Bible which he believed, and I wrote one which I do not believe."