"But I am glad," concluded Hellar as he arose, "that I do not believe Gutenberg's Bible either, for I should very much dislike to think of meeting him in Paradise."
~7~
After taking leave of my companions I walked on alone, oblivious to the gay throng, for I had many things on which to ponder. In these two men I felt that I had found heroic figures. Their fund of knowledge, which they prized so highly, seemed to me pitifully circumscribed and limited, their revolutionary plans hopelessly vague and futile. But the intellectual stature of a man is measured in terms of the average of his race, and, thus viewed, Zimmern and Hellar were intellectual giants of heroic proportions.
As I walked through a street of shops. I paused before the display window of a bookstore of the level. Most of these books I had previously discovered were lurid-titled tales of licentious love. But among them I now saw a volume bearing the title "God's Anointed," and recalled that I had seen it before and assumed it to be but another like its fellows.
Entering the store I secured a copy and, impatient to inspect my purchase, I bent my steps to my favourite retreat in the nearby Hall of Flowers. In a secluded niche near the misty fountain I began a hasty perusal of this imperially inspired word of God who had anointed the Hohenzollerns masters of the earth. Hellar's description had prepared me for a preposterous and absurd work, but I had not anticipated anything quite so audacious could be presented to a race of civilized men, much less that they could have accepted it in good faith as the Germans evidently did.
"God's Anointed," as Hellar had scoffingly inferred, not only proclaimed the Germans as the chosen race, but also proclaimed an actual divinity of the blood of the House of Hohenzollern. That William II did have some such notions in his egomania I believe is recorded in authentic history. But the way Eitel I had adapted that faith to the rather depressing facts of the failure of world conquest would have been extremely comical to me, had I not seen ample evidence of the colossal effect of such a faith working in the credulous child-mind of a people so utterly devoid of any saving sense of humour.
Not unfamiliar with the history of the temporal reign of the Popes of the middle ages, I could readily comprehend the practical efficiency of such a mixture of religious faith with the affairs of earth. For the God of the German theology exacted no spiritual worship of his people, but only a very temporal service to the deity's earthly incarnation in the form of the House of Hohenzollern.
The greatest virtue, according to this mundane theology, was obedience, and this doctrine was closely interwoven with the caste system of German society. The virtue of obedience required the German to renounce discontent with his station, and to accept not only the material status into which he was born, with science aforethought, but the intellectual limits and horizons of that status. The old Christian doctrine of heresy was broadened to encompass the entire mental life. To think forbidden thoughts, to search after forbidden knowledge, that was at once treason against the Royal House and rebellion against the divine plan.
German theology, confounding divine and human laws, permitted no dual overlapping spheres of mundane and celestial rule as had all previous religious and, social orders since Christ had commanded his disciples to "Render unto Caesar--" There could be no conscientious objection to German law on religious grounds; no problem of church and state, for the church was the state.
In this book that masqueraded as the word of God, I looked in vain for some revelation of future life. But it was essentially a one-world theology; the most immortal thing was the Royal House for which the worker was asked to slave, the soldier to die that Germany might be ruled by the Hohenzollerns and that the Hohenzollerns might sometime rule the world.