One or two other art incidents of the period may be noted. A domestic one was the gift to the Emperor by the Empress of a model of her hand in Carrara marble, life-sized, by the German sculptor, Rheinhold Begas. The Emperor, it is well known, has no special liking for the companionship of ladies, but he confesses to an admiration for pretty feminine hands. Another incident was the Emperor's order to the painter, Professor Rochling, to paint a picture representing the famous episode in the China campaign, when Admiral Seymour gave the order "Germans to the Front." It is to the present day a popular German engraving. The year was also remarkable for a visit to Berlin of Coquelin aîné, the great French actor. The Emperor saw him in "Cyrano de Bergerac," was, like all the rest of the play-going world, delighted with both play and player, and held a long and lively conversation with the artist. Lastly may be mentioned a telegram of the Emperor's to the once-famed tragic actress, Adelaide Ristori, in Rome, congratulating her on her eightieth birthday and expressing his regret that he had never met her. A basket of flowers simultaneously arrived from the German Embassy.
We are now in 1903. During the preceding years the Emperor's thoughts, as has been seen, were occupied with art as a means of educating his folk, purifying their sentiments, and, above all, making them faithful lieges of the House of Hohenzollern. By a natural association of ideas we find him this year thinking much and deeply about religion; for, though artists are not a species remarkable for the depth or orthodoxy of their views on religious matters, art and religion are close allies, and probably the greater the artist the more real religion he will be found to have.
In this year, accordingly, the Emperor made his remarkable confession of religious faith to his friend, Admiral Hollmann. He had just heard a lecture by Professor Delitzsch on "Babel und Bibel," and as he considered the Professor's views to some extent subversive of orthodox Christian belief, he took the opportunity to tell his people his own sentiments on the whole matter. In writing to Admiral Hollmann he instructed him to make the "confession" as public as possible, and it was published in the October number of the Grenzboten, a Saxon monthly, sometimes used for official pronouncements. The Emperor's letter to Admiral Hollmann contained what follows:—
"I distinguish between two different sorts of Revelation: a current, to a certain extent historical, and a purely religious, which was meant to prepare the way for the appearance of the Messiah. As to the first, I should say that I have not the slightest doubt that God eternally revealed Himself to the race of mankind He created. He breathed into man His breath, that is a portion of Himself, a soul. With fatherly love and interest He followed the development of humanity; in order to lead and encourage it further He 'revealed' Himself, now in the person of this, now of that great wise man, priest or king, whether pagan, Jew or Christian. Hammurabi was one of these, Moses, Abraham, Homer, Charlemagne, Luther, Shakespeare, Goethe, Kant, Kaiser William the Great—these He selected and honoured with His Grace, to achieve for their peoples, according to His will, things noble and imperishable. How often has not my grandfather explicitly declared that he was an instrument in the hand of the Lord! The works of great souls are the gifts of God to the people, that they may be able to build further on them as models, that they may be able to feel further through the confusion of the undiscovered here below. Doubtless God has 'revealed' Himself to different peoples in different ways according to their situation and the degree of their civilization. Then just as we are overborne most by the greatness and might of the lovely nature of the Creation when we regard it, and as we look are astonished at the greatness of God there displayed, even so can we of a surety thankfully and admiringly recognize, by whatever truly great or noble thing a man or a people does, the revelation of God. His influence acts on us and among us directly.
"The second sort of Revelation, the more religious sort, is that which led up to the appearance of the Lord. From Abraham onward it was introduced, slowly but foreseeingly, all-wisely and all-knowingly, for otherwise humanity were lost. And now commences the astonishing working of God's Revelation. The race of Abraham and the peoples that sprang from it regard, with an iron logic, as their holiest possession, the belief in a God. They must worship and cultivate Him. Broken up during the captivity in Egypt, the separated parts were brought together again for the second time by Moses, always striving to cling fast to monotheism. It was the direct intervention of God that caused this people to come to life again. And so it goes on through the centuries till the Messiah, announced and foreshadowed by the prophets and psalmists, at last appears, the greatest Revelation of God to the world. Then he appeared in the Son Himself; Christ is God; God in human form. He redeemed us, He spurs us on, He allures us to follow Him, we feel His fire burn in us, His sympathy strengthens us, His displeasure annihilates us, but also His care saves us. Confident of victory, building only on His word, we pass through labour, scorn, suffering, misery and death, for in His Word we have God's revealed Word, and He never lies.
"That is my view of the matter. The Word is especially for us evangelicals made the essential thing by Luther, and as good theologian surely Delitzsch must not forget that our great Luther taught us to sing and believe—'Thou shalt suffer, let the Word stand.' To me it goes without saying that the Old Testament contains a large number of fragments of a purely human historical kind and not 'God's revealed Word.' They are mere historical descriptions of events of all sorts which occurred in the political, religious, moral, and intellectual life of the people of Israel. For example, the act of legislation on Sinai may be regarded as only symbolically inspired by God, when Moses had recourse to the revival of perhaps some old-time law (possibly the codex, an offshoot of the codex of Hammurabi), to bring together and to bind together institutions of His people which were become shaky and incapable of resistance. Here the historian can, from the spirit or the text, perhaps construct a connexion with the Law of Hammurabi, the friend of Abraham, and perhaps logically enough; but that would no way lessen the importance of the fact that God suggested it to Moses and in so far revealed Himself to the Israelite people.
"Consequently it is my idea that for the future our good Professor would do well to avoid treating of religion as such, on the other hand continue to describe unmolested everything that connects the religion, manners, and custom of the Babylonians with the Old Testament. On the whole, I make the following deductions:—
"1. I believe in One God.
"2. We humans need, in order to teach Him, a Form, especially for our children.
"3. This Form has been to the present time the Old Testament in its existing tradition. This Form will certainly decidedly alter considerably with the discovery of inscriptions and excavations; there is nothing harmful in that, it is even no harm if the nimbus of the Chosen People loses much thereby. The kernel and substance remain always the same—God, namely, and His work.