has ever fought more heroically than the millions of blinded and
misguided wretches who challenged a world in arms, and went to their
doom singing religious hymns and patriotic songs. And it is not true
that there is some mysterious fatality in temperament or race. The
race theory is a Prussian theory, and it is a sinister theory, the
prolific mother of many political and moral heresies. National
temperament changes with circumstances, and the German temperament has
often changed in the course of history. If the Germans may be
described to-day as a nation of practical materialists, at one time
they were described as a nation of dreamers. If the German Government
may be described to-day as a despotic State, at one time it was
described as a Government of free cities.

The truth is that national character has little to do with race. It is
the result of political institutions and religious beliefs. And it is
the political institutions and religious beliefs of modern Germany
which largely explain the failure of Democracy.

We have already pointed out the baneful influence of the Socialist
creed. But there is another creed which has exercised an even more
baneful influence. If we attempt to trace, farther back in history,
the main source of German character, we are driven to the conclusion
that it is Lutheranism which is responsible for the perversion of the
German soul, that it is Lutheranism that is the _fons et origo
malorum_. Before the war all our ideas about religion and philosophy
in Germany were made up of unmeaning formulas. And I make the
confident forecast that all those ideas will have to be transvalued in
the light of the present catastrophe.

If I were asked to sum up the achievements of Lutheranism, I would say
that it has accomplished two things equally fatal to Germany and
Europe.

On the one hand it has broken up the spiritual unity of Medieval
Christendom and the political unity of the Holy German Empire into two
thousand four hundred petty principalities. It has set up a tribal
religion and the pagan idolatry of the State; and, on the other hand,
it has broken up the human soul into two water-tight compartments.

Or to express the Lutheran achievement in terms of freedom and
despotism, it has, in the first place, killed political liberty by
surrendering all ecclesiastical power to the Prince, or to the State
incarnated in the Prince. It has brought about the fusion and
confusion of spiritual and tem