be
illustrated.

The new time began in Germany, after the invention of printing, by a
struggle in which Germans broke the fetters of the Papal Church of the
Middle Ages, and passed from submissive belief in authority, to an
energetic, independent search after truth. But they did not at the same
time succeed in building up a compact monarchy out of the unsymmetrical
feudalism of the Middle Ages. The Imperial House of Hapsburg became the
zealous opponent of the national development. Owing to this opposition
arose the power of separate territorial princes, and the political
weakness of Germany became the more perceptible, the more the rising
vigour of the nation demanded an answering development of political
energy. From this the German character suffered much. Ecclesiastical
disputes were for a long period the only national interest; there was
but too great a deficiency in Germans of that pride and pleasure in a
fatherland, and of that whole circle of moral feelings, to which
political independence gives life, even in the most obscure individual.

After the Reformation it became the fate of the German nation to
develope its character under conditions which were materially different
from those of the other civilised people of Europe. In France, the
Protestant party was struck down with bloody zeal by the crown under
the despotic government of Louis XIV.; and the Revolution was the
growth of this victory. In England, the Protestant party gained the
dominion under the Tudors; the struggle against the Stuarts and the
completion of the English constitution was the result. In Germany, the
opposition of parties was not followed either by victory or
conciliation; the result was the Thirty Years' War, and the political
paralysis of Germany, from which it is only now beginning to recover.

This Thirty Years' War, the worst desolation of a populous nation since
the national exodus, is the second period of German history which gave
a peculiar tendency to the character of the people. The war shattered
into ruins the popular strength, but it also certainly removed the
dangers which threatened German cultivation, by the alliance of the
Imperial House with the Roman Hierarchy. It also separated the Imperial
State, politically, from the rest of Germany; what was lost to France
in the west by the Hapsburgers, was gradually regained to Germany in
the east by another Royal House. The great destruction caused by the
war, changed the State