itated the war.

The Christian who regards all these non-Christian influences as "Pagan,"
and feels that a "return to Paganism" explains the essential immorality
of Germany's conduct, usually has a grossly inaccurate idea of Paganism.
Whatever may be said of sexual developments in modern and ancient times,
we shall see that the Roman writers held principles which most decidedly
made for peace and brotherhood and justice. In point of fact, the
majority of the German writers who have been responsible for the
education of Germany in war-like ideas have been Christians. The Emperor
himself, who is mainly responsible because of his deliberate
prostitution of German schools to militarist purposes since 1891, will
hardly be described as other than Christian; certainly every prelate or
minister in Germany would vehemently resent such a description.
Treitschke, who is probably the best known in England of the Imperialist
writers, definitely bases his appalling conception of life on Christian
principles, and claims that he is acting from a sense of the divine
mission of Germany. General von Bernhardi uses precisely the same
Christian language. But these are only two in a hundred writers who,
for more than half a century, have been educating Germany in aggressive
ideas, and, speaking from personal acquaintance with their works, I
should say that the overwhelming majority of them are Christians. Not a
single Socialist, and not a single well-known Rationalist, has
contributed to their pernicious gospel.

Probably the one German writer in the mind of those English people who
speak of Germany's return to Paganism is Friedrich Nietzsche. It is true
that Nietzsche was bitterly anti-Christian, and he has probably had a
greater influence in Germany, in spite of his strictures on the country,
than many seem disposed to allow. German booksellers have recently drawn
up a statement in regard to the favourite books of soldiers in the
field, and it appears that Nietzsche's _Thus Spake Zarathustra_ is
second on the list--leagues ahead of the Bible. But to conclude from
this that the anti-moral doctrine of the Pagan Nietzsche is the chief
source of the outrages committed is one of those slipshod inferences
which make one despair of Christian literature.

In the first place, Goethe is even more popular with the troops than
Nietzsche, and, although Goethe too was a Pagan, his teaching was the
very antithesis of crime, violence, injustice, or hypo