n Eagle._

A frank declaration that he was opposed to Germany in the present great
war was the answer returned today [Dec. 21, 1914] by the Rev. Dr. Newell
Dwight Hillis to the protests against his sermon at Plymouth Church last
night, in which he scored militarism and the Kaiser.

Not only did Dr. Hillis come out with the statement that he had said and
meant all to which exception was taken in his sermon, but, in an
interview today in his study, in the Arbuckle Institute, he asserted as
well that he had told but little of what he had come to believe about
Germany. This position, he said, was that America and all the world must
hope for German defeat, and must see that Germany was in the wrong.

"I was for Germany five months ago," said Dr. Hillis. "I have been
lecturing for five years about the lessons we might learn from Germany.
Five months ago, it may be remembered, I gave an interview, in which I
praised Germany and in which I took the part of the German people in the
dreadful war that had come.

"But I have changed my mind. I have seen that I was mistaken. Several
months ago I gave instructions to my lecture bureau to withdraw my
lecture, 'The New Germany,' from my list. That was about the middle of
September, and it was only then that I realized what a German success
would mean to the world--how there could be nothing else but a world of
armed camps, how we in this country, too, would have to adopt militarism
in order to live.

"Just prior to that time, in the first of my Sunday evening sermons in
this course, I had praised the Kaiser. I believed in the German ideals,
I believed in German progress, German inventions, German principles. But
I was wrong. I have now become convinced of what I never imagined
before--that in the German viewpoint the only sin against the Holy Ghost
is military impotency, and, to use Treitschke's words again, the only
virtue is militarism."

The pastor of Plymouth uttered this attack upon Germany with a
scornfulness which the printed word can hardly indicate. He was as
strongly against Germany--more strongly against Germany now than he had
before been in favor of Germany, he said. It was a position, he said, to
which everybody in the United States was turning, and it was inevitable
that Germany should find the world against her.

In his frank avowal of his position regarding Germany and the Kaiser,
Dr. Hillis admitted, too, that his sermon last night had contained more
than ap