e Gothic environment and
disposition.

The first question the old man usually plumped was:

"How's your German going?"

"Slowly. Pegging along. I suppose it's because I don't get up much
of a liking for it. There's something about it that goes against my
grain."

And then Anderson would be off for that particular session. On one
early occasion he had said, jestingly:

"I guess you will have to fall back upon the natural method."

"What's that?" had come back the innocent interrogatory.

"Take a sweetheart. She will teach you more useful German in a month
than you can learn from the pedagogues in a year. Right here in the
best parts of Dresden are streets where these ladies can be rented
with their rooms per week or per month cheap, with all the German
you want thrown in. Are we to assume it is by this system that the
German universities are able to turn out what the world believes are
the best students?"

"I never heard anything about that back home," confessed Kirtley,
always letting the bars down to encourage a monologue.

"Of course not. That would be to interfere with our American
readiness to admit German transcendence."

"But how do you harmonize the frank state of morals here with the
fact that the Germans are the great religious authorities? How have
they established such a reputation abroad for the morality that is
assumed to go with Protestantism?"

"That is simple enough. First, by claiming that the French are
degenerate. Second, by retaining religion with its morals as an
adjunct of an unmoral and authoritative militarism. Religion is to
them a topic for expert investigation and study just as is
militarism or any natural product--oil, coal, the chemical elements,
anything. The Teuton specialist goes at it as at any objective
science. His analytical and synthetic processes simply explore in
his own subterranean caverns apropos of theology. He has taken over
the Bible as the Kaiser has taken over Jerusalem. Wilhelm is
becoming the Cerberus of Christianity--sole and surly guardian of
its meanings and influence.

"But you never see any men in these German churches, do you? They
don't go to church. Nor the women very much. You see old women and
children at worship. This is because the German has always typically
worshipped Gott on the battlefield or in the military camps--out in
the open. The German God is an out-of-doors God and is distinctively
associated with the thought of war. God within wal