and great and wise; we seemed
to be initiated into the secrets of the divine plan of the universe.
If our race terminates with you, our honor is turned to shame and our
wisdom to folly. For if the German stock was some time to be merged
into that of Rome, it was better that this had been into the old Rome
than into a new. We faced the former and conquered it; before the
latter you have been scattered like the dust. Now, however, since
affairs are as they are, you are not to conquer them with physical
weapons; only your spirit is to rise and stand upright over against
them. To you has been vouchsafed the greater destiny of establishing
generally the empire of the spirit and of reason, and of wholly
annihilating rude physical power as that which dominates the world. If
you shall do this, then are you worthy of descent from us.

In these voices also mingle the spirits of your later ancestors, of
those who fell in the holy struggle for freedom of religion and of
faith. Save our honor, likewise, they cry to you. It was not wholly
clear to us for what we fought. Besides the legitimate resolve not to
allow ourselves to be dominated in matters of conscience by a foreign
power, we were also impelled by a higher spirit who never revealed
himself entirely unto us. To you this spirit is revealed, if you have
the power to look into the spirit world, and he gazes upon you
with clear and lofty eyes. The motley and confused intermingling of
sensuous and of spiritual impulses is wholly to be deposed from
its world-dominion; and spirit alone, absolute, and stripped of all
sensuous impulses, is to take the helm of human affairs. Our blood was
shed that this spirit might have freedom to develop and to grow to an
independent existence. Upon you it depends to give to this sacrifice
its signification and its justification by installing this spirit into
the world-dominion destined for him. If this is not the final goal
toward which all the development of our nation has thus far aimed,
our struggles, too, become a passing, empty farce, and the freedom of
spirit and of conscience that we won is an empty word, if henceforth
there is to be no longer any spirit or any conscience whatsoever.

Your descendants, still unborn, adjure you. You boast of your
forefathers, they cry to you, and proudly you connect yourselves with
a noble lineage. Take care that the chain may not be broken in you; so
do that we also may boast of you, and that through you, a