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has ever fought more heroically than the millions of blinded and misguided wretches who challenged a world in arms, and went to their doom singing religious hymns and patriotic songs. And it is not true that there is some mysterious fatality in temperament or race. The race theory is a Prussian theory, and it is a sinister theory, the prolific mother of many political and moral heresies. National temperament changes with circumstances, and the German temperament has often changed in the course of history. If the Germans may be described to-day as a nation of practical materialists, at one time they were described as a nation of dreamers. If the German Government may be described to-day as a despotic State, at one time it was described as a Government of free cities. The truth is that national character has little to do with race. It is the result of political institutions and religious beliefs. And it is the political institutions and religious beliefs of modern Germany which largely explain the failure of Democracy. We have already pointed out the baneful influence of the Socialist creed. But there is another creed which has exercised an even more baneful influence. If we attempt to trace, farther back in history, the main source of German character, we are driven to the conclusion that it is Lutheranism which is responsible for the perversion of the German soul, that it is Lutheranism that is the _fons et origo malorum_. Before the war all our ideas about religion and philosophy in Germany were made up of unmeaning formulas. And I make the confident forecast that all those ideas will have to be transvalued in the light of the present catastrophe. If I were asked to sum up the achievements of Lutheranism, I would say that it has accomplished two things equally fatal to Germany and Europe. On the one hand it has broken up the spiritual unity of Medieval Christendom and the political unity of the Holy German Empire into two thousand four hundred petty principalities. It has set up a tribal religion and the pagan idolatry of the State; and, on the other hand, it has broken up the human soul into two water-tight compartments. Or to express the Lutheran achievement in terms of freedom and despotism, it has, in the first place, killed political liberty by surrendering all ecclesiastical power to the Prince, or to the State incarnated in the Prince. It has brought about the fusion and confusion of spiritual and tem
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