poral powers. It has decreed that the
religion of the ruler shall determine the religion of the subject.
_Cujus regio illius religio._ From the beginning his own
ecclesiastical policy compelled Luther to sanction the bigamy of the
Landgrave Philip of Hesse. In the most violent of his tracts he
denounced a miserable German peasantry, and he called upon the
nobility to massacre those peasants who had only too faithfully obeyed
the provocations of the reformer.

And, in the second place, Lutheranism has killed spiritual liberty by
creating an inner world of emotions and of dreams and an outer world
of social and political activities without any relation to the inner
world. It has divorced speculation and action, theory and practice.
The German is like the symbolical eagle of the Habsburg. He has two
heads, and both look in an opposite direction.

I would say that the poison of Lutheranism has been acting like that
mysterious Indian poison called "curare," which I used to inject in my
distant student days when I had to dissect frogs in the Zoological
Laboratory at Liege. The "curare" does not kill the nerves, for the
frog still suffers under the dissecting knife. Nor does it kill the
muscles, for the muscles still react if you stimulate them. But the
poison cuts the connection between the nerves and the muscles. The
nerves can no more transmit their orders to the muscles. Even so
Lutheranism has not killed the thinking power of the German people. On
the contrary, it has given it a morbid stimulus, as speculation is no
more hampered by reality. Nor has it paralyzed their external
activities, but it has prevented any connection between the two. It
has prevented the thinking from influencing the acting. It justifies
the recent damning statement of Prince von Buelow, who ought to be a
competent judge, that the Germans have remained an essentially
unpolitical people.

At the outbreak of the Reformation there took place in Wittenberg, the
Mecca of Lutheranism, a memorable and ominous meeting to which few
textbooks take the trouble to allude, and which has had more
far-reaching consequences than any meeting known to history. It was
the meeting between Dr. Martinus Luther and the Grand Master of the
Teutonic Order, Albrecht of Hohenzollern. Luther advised the Grand
Master to secularize his Order, to confiscate its immense territories,
and to proclaim himself Duke of Prussia. Under such auspices arose the
Prussian State. Under s