erious young man going to Wittenberg and the
frivolous young man going to Paris in quest of worldly amusement. That
pro-German and anti-French prejudice has continued until our own day.
In vain have I for twenty years attempted in the Universities of
Scotland to send our graduates to French Universities. In vain did I
contend that one single year spent in the Sorbonne provided greater
intellectual stimulus than a whole decade spent in a German
University. The old Puritan feeling against France proved too strong.
Until the year 1914 the stream of our students continued to be
directed to Goettingen and Heidelberg, to Bonn and Berlin. Even in our
distant colonies, even in Toronto, I found that the majority of
teachers were "made in Germany," whilst of American Universities it is
hardly too much to say that many of them had actually become German
institutions.

III.

The prejudice which sent Scottish and English ministers of the Gospel
to complete their preparation in Germany was all the more
extraordinary because Positive Christianity had almost vanished from
the theological faculties of Protestant Germany. Even as Holy Russia
has remained on the whole the most Christian nation in Europe,
Protestant Prussia was certainly the least Christian. It was aptly
said by Huxley of the philosophy of Comte, that Comtism was
Catholicism minus Christianity. We might say in the same way of German
theology, that it was philosophy and metaphysics and philology minus
Christianity. Seventy-five years ago David Frederick Strauss, who
would be forgotten but for the pamphlet of Nietzsche, wrote a
ponderous treatise of a thousand pages, translated by George Eliot, to
prove that Christ was a myth. At the end of his life he strenuously
attempted in his "Old and New Faith" to find a substitute for
Christian theology. German Protestantism travelled the road he
indicated. The German people have ceased to believe in Christianity;
but they have come to believe in the self-styled Anti-Christ
Nietzsche. They have ceased to believe in God; but they still believe
in His self-appointed vicegerent, the Kaiser. They have ceased to
believe in Providence; but they still believe in a Providential German
nation. They have ceased to believe in the Holy Trinity; but they
believe all the more fanatically in the New Trinity of the Superman,
the Super-race and the Super-State. And it is this new fanatical
belief which has brought about the war of the nations.