The wealth and beauty of European his-
tory are constituted by this variegated drama,
wherein the free brother peoples of Europe are
seen, now hating, shunning, or fighting one an-
other, now joining hands to work for common
ends.
tory are constituted by this variegated drama,
wherein the free brother peoples of Europe are
seen, now hating, shunning, or fighting one an-
other, now joining hands to work for common
ends.
Treitschke - 1915 - Germany, France, Russia, and Islam
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? 250 Luther and the German Nation
but it was Upper Germany which contributed the
mighty language which was from thenceforth
to hold moral sway over evangelical Germany.
These districts of Southern and Middle Germany
have from time immemorial been the warm cradle
of our poetry, and also of our linguistic develop-
ment. And this High German was the language of
Luther's own home. Its accents had been dear to
him from earliest childhood, and he had heard
them from the lips of the people in the mines at
Mansfeld, the quarry-men employed by his dear
father. Goethe alone has rivalled him in his com-
mand over language; but, notwithstanding this
eloquence, he remains the most "popular" of all
our writers. His works combine in themselves
elements usually believed to be incompatible.
They show deep thought, close compression of
matter, all-compelling argument, and an immense
prodigality of magnificent words, so that the
reader seems to hear the heartfelt accents of the
preacher himself. Their gift to the imaginative
is immense, and the meditative are left with endless
food for thought. This language of freedom and
truth, born as it was in the midst of wars, cannot
deny the tokens of its origin to this day. It is a
language created to voice mighty wrath, to sport
and jest, to storm the pinnacles of thought, to
gently whisper the inmost secrets of the heart.
But let a man once seek to drive or coerce our
mother tongue to hide its meaning, to make treach-
erous and biting salHes, or even to pander to an
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? Luther and the German Nation 251
uneducated craving for the charming and the
piquant, and he will get but little from it; such a
person will find himself obliged to go and beg at the
table of strangers.
More than a hundred years elapsed before this
new German, which shed a glory over the hymns
and sermons of the Evangelical Church, became
the common property of our people. Learning
then became popular and worldly in its turn, and
our ancestors saw the fulfilment of the saying
which Ulrich von Hutten had proclaimed aloud
to the world in the very first days of the nation's
rapturous hope: ''Formerly the priests alone were
learned; now God has given skill to all to read
and understand. " About the middle of the six-
teenth century a sad and paralyzing influence
descended on the Lutheran branch of German
Protestantism, for little beside the solemn strains
of the evangelical hymns was left to remind men
what the original spirit of the Reformation had
been, and ambitious theologians, in the old and the
new Church alike, sought to determine the direc-
tion and limitations of study. It was only the
heroic courage of the vigorous sister church in the
Netherlands, and the struggle of the Calvinists
there against Spain, that preserved a degenerate
Lutherism from certain destruction. Not until we
experienced the miseries of the Thirty Years' War
did we realize the real trend of affairs. The
Pietists of Halle roused once again in our people
the vital spirit of the gospels, the spirit of brotherly
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? 252 Luther and the German Nation
love, which sought to make the evangelical life a
reality, and which the barren and unprofitable
quarrels of the last few decades had obscured.
Pufendorf drove the theologians out of the domain
of political science; Thomasius was the first to dare
to speak German from a German professorial
chair. And on the soil thus prepared there at once
grew up our new learning and our new poetry, free
from all the harshness consequent on a religious
bias, fundamentally worldly, far bolder in its con-
ceptions than any theories ever sanctioned by
Luther, but still perfectly Protestant. All the
leaders of this new learning were Protestants.
The new ideal of humanity could proceed only from
the autonomy of the conscience won for us by
Luther. The Bavarian Jesuits were horrified
on hearing the "Lutheran German" of this new
culture, but none the less it continued its peace-
ful march of victory even through Catholic
Germany, until it had at last drawn all things
German into the fresh stream of its ideals. And
we may recognize with pride to-day that even the
champions of Rome from among our countrymen
long ago learnt ''Lutheran German," and that
they fight against us with swords forged on our
own anvils.
Honest worldly activity did not receive any
moral justification until the Church's activities
were entirely limited to spiritual matters. This
period saw the solution of the riddle which had
seemed insolvable to the mediaeval poet; riches
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? Luther and the German Nation 253
and honour were now found to be perfectly com-
patible with the grace of God. Eternity itself
now entered the sphere of the believer's material
life, and he began to feel that he could and must do
service by means of his handiwork. Even the
soldiers received from Luther the comfortable
assurance that they too would be in a state of
salvation if they sought to perform their hard
duties faithfully. But as soon as it was seen that
a Church could exist without clergy, it became
impossible for the clergy even in purely Catholic
countries, to persist in claiming to be the highest
order in the social scale. In Germany the middle
strata of society, to which Luther had chiefly
addressed himself, became ever more and more the
elite of the nation. Moreover, the determining
power which education and culture, and iinfor-
tunately also doctrinarianism, wield in German
life to this day had its origin in the achievements
of the greatest of German professors.
Protestantism is the product of a robust and
virile century which cared little for women, and the
sobriety of the outward forms of its worship do not
always satisfy the pious longings of the female
heart. Yet Luther raised the German women to a
higher level than that occupied by them in the days
when the merciful Mother of God was invoked.
The woman's domain, the home, was brought into
high honour by him before God and man. It was
not without a hard struggle that he took courage
to woo his Kate; the scales were finally turned
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? 254 Luther and the German Nation
not only by a desire for domestic bliss, but also
by a sense of a sacred duty to be performed. How
often he cried out to monks and nuns, "Who
commanded you to pledge yourselves to a life that
is contrary to God and to His laws, and to swear
that you are not men and women? ** If he was
justified in putting this question, if matrimon}^ was
really a holy state, and better pleasing to God than
the vow of the tonsured, it became incumbent upon
him to testify to the truth of his teaching in his own
person. He knew what a muddy tide of base and
disgusting insinuations would roll up against him,
whose spotless name had hitherto been as a shield
to a great cause and had withstood all the darts
of the slanderers. He took to himself this cross of
his own free will, for the moral force of evangelical
truth could not be demonstrated more victoriously
or convincingly than in the marriage of an escaped
monk and an escaped nun who thereby set
an example to thousands of pious people.
This marriage did, indeed, form an example.
This family, laden with all the curses of Rome,
lives in all our hearts to-day. We think of it on
Christmas Eve, in front of the Christmas-tree,
when the fresh voices of our children proclaim the
joyful tidings, "From high heaven I am come. '*
We see the old professor, the spiritual adviser of
his dear Germans, dealing out help and comfort
and instruction to all the doubting and the heavy
laden who flock to him from far and near; we see
him, strong in the possession of a free mind, ever on
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? Luther and the German Nation 255
the side of nature, of the heart, of equity, and of
love. We hear his hearty laugh as he speaks
strong words of encouragement to the timorous
Melanchthon, or praises the greatness of his small
Greek with the unenvious enthusiasm of a friend.
We enjoy his golden mood when in the evening he
passes the goblet round his hospitable table, where
my lady Music, the most German of the arts, has
her place among the many tipplers.
No ill intent can harboured be
Where men sing in good company.
We mourn with him when he is overcome by the
most human of griefs, and weeps at the bier of his
little Lena. Such was the first evangelical parson-
age. And how many tears have since been dried
by our country pastors' wives, and how many good
and clever men have since been brought up in the
learned though not unnatural atmosphere of these
peaceful homes !
All our actions are but piecework, and history
records the name of no man who was not greater
than his work. The most priceless legacy be-
queathed by Luther to our people is, after all, the
legacy of himself and of the life-giving might of his
heaven-inspired mind. None among the other
modern nations can boast of a man who was the
mouthpiece of his countrymen in quite the same
way, and who succeeded as fully in giving expres-
sion to the innermost character of his nation. A
stranger may inquire in bewilderment how it was
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? 256 Luther and the German Nation
possible for such striking contrasts to show them-
selves in the same human soul. Men wonder how
it was possible to combine a capacity for towering
anger with a pious and sincere belief, high wisdom
with childlike simplicity, deep mysticism with
heartfelt enjoyment of life, uncouthness and rough-
ness with the tenderest goodness of heart; they
marvel that the tremendous personage who ended
a letter to his un-grace, Duke George of Saxony,
with the words, "Martin Luther, by the grace of
God evangelist at Wittenberg," could then kneel
humbly in the dust before God. We Germans are
not puzzled by these apparent contradictions; all
we say is, " Here speaks our own blood. ' ' From the
deep eyes of this uncouth son of a German farmer
there flashed the ancient and heroic courage of
the Germanic races -- a courage which does not flee
from the world, but rather seeks to dominate it
by the strength of its moral purpose. And just
because he gave utterance to ideas already living
in the soul of his nation, this poor monk, who had
but lately made his humble pilgrimage from the
Augustinian monastery, on Monte Pincio, to the
halls of St. Peter, was able to grow and develop
very rapidly, until he had become as dangerous
to the new Roman universal empire as the assailing
German hordes were to the empire of the Caesars.
One generation after Luther, four fifths of our
people belonged to the evangelical religion. In
most of the districts of Germany, ruled by the
Roman Church to-day, she owes her restoration to
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? Luther and the German Nation 257
the argument of the sword, and almost everywhere
where the Gospel was violently stamped out, the
German spirit languishes even now as if one of its
wings had been broken. In the districts where
German population is in close and unfriendly con-
tact with our alien race, Protestantism has ever
been our safest frontier guard. In our North-
eastern provinces, German and Protestant, Polish
and Roman Catholic have long been regarded as
synonymous terms, and of all the German races
in Austria none has remained as faithful to its
nationality as the Protestant Saxon population
of Siebenburgen.
It would well become us at this festival, when the
reformer stands in person in our midst, to remember
the warning which he once gave to his Germans:
*' God's Word and grace is a driving thunderstorm,
which does not return over ground once covered.
It visited the Jews, but is now past, and they have
nothing of it left. Paul brought it to Greece.
It passed away there too, and now they have
nought but the Turks. Rome and the Latian land
were likewise blessed; now they have lost it, and
the Pope alone remains. And you Germans
must not think that you will keep it for ever, for
ingratitude and contempt will drive it hence. Let
him therefore that can, seize what he can ; slothful
hands will reap a bad harvest. " The same de-
structive powers which once stemmed the natural
progress of the Reformation are still among us
to-day, although their form is changed. Who has
17
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? 258 Luther and the German Nation
not noted the unloving disagreement among
believers, the fleshly gospel of factious spirits,
and the impudent self -righteousness of the epi-
cureans, as Luther called them?
But these blemishes are thrown into the shade by
the more consoling signs which are not wanting
in our age. A sense of deep and organic relation-
ship binds the present to the age of Luther. It
compels the artist to readopt almost unconsciously
the architectural forms of the sixteenth century,
and it drives the scholar to carry his researches
into the heart of that stormy period. Many things,
only dimly divined in Luther's day, have been
developed and completed in ours. The new world,
then discovered, has only lately made its entry
into history, and its most promising and fruitful
countries belong to the evangelical religion. Far
away on the Pacific there are pious hearts full of
the remembrance of the country where once was
rocked the cradle of Martin Luther. The art of
printing has only lately revealed itself as a link
able to bind nation to nation.
The unity of Germany and Italy stands secure,
and the transformation of our German ecclesiasti-
cal princedoms was followed by the destruction of
the last and worst of the ecclesiastical dominations,
the Pontifical State. Freedom of thought and
belief has been assured to all the nations of the
civilized world, and in the Evangelical Church a
vigorous and unbroken continuity of life still
manifests itself. The disunion to be observed in it
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? Luther and the German Nation 259
is but an indication of the fact that religion has a
firmer hold on all hearts to-day than it had in the
days of o\ir first enlightenment. But in the midst
of the dissensions the Evangelical Church has won
two peaceful victories at least : she has united the
contending sister Churches of Protestantism in an
evangelical union, and she is now engaged in the
task of developing in her constitution the almost
vanished idea of a congregational system.
The period is one of great blessing, and no
Protestant must give up hoping that even happier
days will come, when our entire nation will honour
Martin Luther as its hero and its teacher. The
fact that the Reformation was not universal in its
results on our country was, as we know, a very
salutary one. If it had triumphed everywhere and
held undisputed sway, the Evangelical Church
could hardly have given free play to that spirit
of humane and broad-minded tolerance which rules
German life to-day. Still the period when ecclesi-
astical differences brought a blessing is now over.
Since the Roman Church has spoken her last word
in proclaiming the infaUibility of the Pope, we feel
more acutely than ever how great is the gulf which
separates the different members of our race. To
span this gulf, to infuse evangelical Christianity
with sufficient vitaHty to enable it to rule our
entire nation -- this is a task which we recognize
as ours, and which later generations will one
day accomplish. This one purpose can never be
fulfilled if we are faint-hearted and descend the
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? 26o Luther and the German Nation
mountain which our courageous fathers climbed in
the sweat of their brow; for never again shall a
priest-ridden Church assemble Luther's com-
patriots round its altars. They will follow no
Church which does not recognize the evangelical
freedom of the Christian, the independence of the
believing and repentant conscience, and which
seeks to interfere with the just rights and functions
of the moral forces of the world, notably the
State. Protestantism has already victoriously
tided over more difficult periods than ours. How
many of us to-day have ancestors who fought for
the gospel at the White Mountain or at Lutzen, or
who ate the bread of banishment for the sake
of their religion ! On this birthday of the Reformer
let us thankfully and bravely raise our voices in
the words of his high-hearted hymn :
And if grief last until the night,
And then again till dawn,
Yet shall my heart aye trust in God
And His almighty power.
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? GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS AND GERMANY'S
FREEDOM
{A Lecture Delivered at the Sing Academy in
Berlin, December, i8g4)
WHEREVER on German soil the song is heard,
"Eine feste Burg ist Unser Gott,"^ with
pious affection thoughts are turned to the com-
memoration of the day which gave to us the saviour
of our Protestant freedom. Yet it comes as a pain-
ful echo of the civil strife of former days when we
realize that a part only of the nation can co-oper-
ate in this festival, and that many of our valiant
countrymen even detest it as treasonable. For
our own part, we will not allow our joy in the
Northern hero to be disturbed by the fact that he
was a foreigner, nor because it was in the darkest
days of our country's past that his star blazed
in the ascendant. In sharp contrast with the
national narrowness of classical antiquity, we find
in the history of the Christian peoples an unending
give and take, a continuous interlacing of general
European interests, wherein the ideals of human-
ity are harmonized with the separate aims of the
' '* God is to us a tower of strength. "
261
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? 262 Germany's Protestant Freedom
nations.
The wealth and beauty of European his-
tory are constituted by this variegated drama,
wherein the free brother peoples of Europe are
seen, now hating, shunning, or fighting one an-
other, now joining hands to work for common
ends. Even the insular kingdom of Britain, more
inclined than all others to reject what is of foreign
origin, has twice in its history owed a decisive
turn of fate to the benevolent hand of a foreigner.
The Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, was the
creator of the British House of Commons, and
was the first of all men to gain the honourable
name of Protector of the English people ; the Dutch-
man, William of Orange, secured for the English
their existing parliamentary government.
Gustavus Adolphus' own home had early
experienced alike the blessings and the curse of
foreign domination. It was by Germany that this
hitherto untouched region of Northern heroes was
won for Christendom, and was incorporated within
the community of the Latin moral world-order.
The German Hanseatic League shut off the
Scandinavian coast from world-trade, and with
the overwhelming power due to its command of
capital was able so harshly to oppress the economic
forces of the young nations of the North that the
three Northern capitals, Stockholm, Copenhagen,
and Bergen, became German harbours, and for a
time even the tenure of the crowns in the Scandi-
navian lands became subject to the approval of the
league of German merchants. In the sixteenth
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 263
century, when the power of the Hanseatic League
declined, there ensued an inevitable reaction
against the foreign German dominion. "All
through God and the Swedish peasantry," thus
was worded the summons to revolt issued to his
Dalecarlians by Gustavus Vasa, the grandfather
of Gustavus Adolphus. Throwing off at once the
Danish yoke, and the yoke of the German mer-
chants, he founded in Sweden a new national
kingdom. Ardent, rejoicing in action, highly
cultured, ever receptive of new ideas, such was the
wild brood of the Vasa; stormy was its passage
through life, often burning its very self in the
flames of its own passions. Undying was the love
of the Swedes for the House of their great Liberator.
At a later date, when there was a failure of the
male line, and when the dynasty was represented
only by the Countesses Palatine and other female
descendants, they refused to allow the name of
the Vasa, and the ears of wheat emblematic of the
line, to be erased from the Swedish coat-of-arms.
At this time, however, when our commercial
supremacy in Scandinavia collapsed, Germany's
thoughts again turned victoriously towards the
North. Gustavus Vasa became a Protestant,
and partitioned the excessive wealth of the old
Church between the Crown and the nobles in such
a manner that the power of the Vasas must hence-
forward stand or fall with the Lutheran Church.
Not here, as in Germany, did the change to Pro-
testantism aiise freely from the conscience of the
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? 264 Germany's Protestant Freedom
people; as in England, it was imposed upon the
nation by a powerful royal house, which, gradually
at first, and then with heart and soul, adopted
the evangelical faith. Thus it came to pass that
Germany, the land ecclesiastically divided by the
Reformation, stood from now onwards between
the Catholic world of the Romans and the strict
Lutheranism of the North. The alliance between
the Swedish Crown and the Lutheran Church be-
came yet more firmly cemented when the grand-
son of Gustavus Vasa, King Sigismund, the elected
King of Poland, reverted to the Roman Church,
and was in consequence driven from the country
after a confused and fiercely contested civil
war. Thereupon the youngest son of Gustavus
Vasa, the father of Gustavus Adolphus, was raised
to the forcibly evacuated throne, under the style
of King Charles IX. He was a severe and rigid
man of affairs, like his father a king of the poor
people, and a protector of Protestantism. Very
soon a threefold war broke out in this unhappy
country, whose enormous area was at this date
populated by barely a million inhabitants, whose
more prosperous southern provinces of Schonen
and Blekingen were still occupied by the Danish
enemies, and which could carry on free intercourse
with the rest of Europe only through a single
North Sea port, alone unhampered by the Danish
Sound-dues. The expelled King in Cracow de-
manded his restoration to the throne; Poland,
Russia, and Denmark were beginning their great
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 265
struggle for the inheritance of the fallen Hansa
power, and for the dominion of the Baltic. Such
was the stress of events when the old King, whose
end was approaching, pointed to his youthful
successor with the words: '' Ilk faciei; he will deal
with it all! "
To nations, as to men of genius, there comes an
hour in which an inner voice speaks to them,
saying, ''Now or never shalt thou manifest thy
best, thy most individual, qualities to the world. "
From the first moment of the reign of Gustavus
Adolphus the Swedish people was animated by a
clear, joyful, and ever-increasing consciousness of
victory. The introspective Lutheran doctrine,
which elsewhere so often led its adherents to
passive obedience, and to a withdrawal from the
struggles of political life, became here, upon this
Northern soil, contentious, like its more vigorous
sister, Calvinism ; and soon from every pulpit went
forth the prophecy that this Gustavus was to be
the Augustus of the Protestant North. A man
altogether after the people's heart was this lad
of seventeen, blond, with shining blue eyes, over-
topping by half a head his tall fellow-countrymen,
serene-spirited and filled with the joy of life,
simple with the simplicity of the old North-land --
for how often did he wait good-humouredly with
his companions for the frozen wine to thaw in the
goblets! -- a master in the art of speech, and if
need should arise a master also in the moving and
homely eloquence of his grandfather. A careful
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? 266 Germany's Protestant Freedom
education had introduced the boy, precocious in
development and avid of learning, to the whole
range of the culture of his time. And yet, as soon
became manifest to all, his heart was in the pro-
-- % fession of arms. Pictures of battle and of victory
chased one another through his dreams. He
rejoiced to know that in his own veins ran pure
the blood of the Gothic heroes. Inseparably and
indistinguishably interfused in his mind with this
warlike national pride was the serious fervour of
his Lutheran creed. The great memories of the
House of Vasa, the close relationship with the old
Protestant races of Brandenburg, Holstein, Hesse,
and the Palatinate, the campaign against his
Catholic cousin in Poland, the general position
of Sweden in the world -- all forced him into the
Protestant camp. With kingly glance surveying
the religious struggles of the time, he asked only
that the Churches, no longer able to control one
another by force, should rather learn the lesson
of mutual toleration. But he was not one like
Richelieu, or Wallenstein, to regard the Church as
a mere means to political ends; he lived by the
Protestant faith, he knew the power of prayer,
and with full heart he sang, Verzage nicht, du
Hduflein klein. ^ The ardour and sincerity of his
religious belief remind us of the men of a day long
past, of the leaders of the League of Schmalkald,
John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse,
were it not that in Gustavus Adolphus the might of
^ "Never despair, you little band. "
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 267
faith awakened, not the patience of the martyr, but
the activity of the hero.
With the aid of his youthful Chancellor, Oxen-
stiern, torn as his country was by civil war, the
King grounded within a few years the best-ordered
hierarchical monarchy of his day. Lagerquist-
Lorbeerzweig, Oernfiycht-Adelfiucht, Erenrot-
Ehrenwurzel -- such were the proud names of the
noble houses which here in Sweden, as throughout
the aristocratic world around the shores of the
Baltic, unwillingly bent their stiff necks before the
power of the Monarchy. With astonishing speed
were the members of this iron-handed aristocracy
won for the service of the Crown by the lure of
renown and booty ; every nobleman who in time of
war remained at home to guard his own kitchen-
midden was deprived of his crown-fief. For this
reason it was possible to impose also upon the
faithful peasantry the heavy burden of military ser-
vice ; every year the clergy announced from their
pulpits the names of the young men who were
summoned for duty. The general administration
of the country was conducted by the King through
the intermediation of five great local boards. Free
deliberation was permitted to the four orders of his
Reichstag, but once the King had made his own
decision he demanded absolute obedience, for, as
he phrased it, "no laurels of war can flourish in an
atmosphere of eternal dispute. " Thus sure of
his own people, he undertook to bring to an end
the three wars left him as a legacy by his father.
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? 268 Germany's Protestant Freedom
and in nineteen years' campaigning built up for
himself an army accustomed to victory. Only
with much labour was he able to enforce a supe-
riority over the Danes. Thereupon, turning to at-
tack the most dangerous enemy of all, he directed
himself against the Muscovites; driving the
Russians from their robbers' nest on the Baltic, he
conquered Ingermanland [now the governmental
area of Petrograd] and Karelia [South-eastern
Finland], the whole bordering country of the Gulf
of Finland, and in the neighbourhood of the
modern Petersburg he erected the column which
announces to the world that here Gustavus Adol-
phus established the boundary of his kingdom.
He then led his devoted followers against the
Poles, and here for the first time encountered
the armed forces of the counter-Reformation. To
the kingdom of Poland, hitherto rejoicing in vic-
tory, he brought the first great defeat of two
centuries, conquering Livonia, securing for the
Protestant Church its threatened possessions, and
establishing his power in the seaports of Prussia.
More and more clearly was now manifested the
leading idea of his life, the foundation of a great
Scandinavian Empire, which should unite under
the blue and yellow flag of Sweden all the
dominions of the Baltic Sea.
These manifold successes fell to the arms of
Gustavus Adolphus without any interference
upon the part of the Powers of the West, for no
states-system was yet in existence. The region of
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 269
Central Europe, this Germany of ours, destined in
a future day to unite the East and the West of
Europe into a Hving Society of States, lay now
prostrate, bleeding from a thousand wounds, torn
asunder by a fierce struggle of factions; and only
when Gustavus Adolphus, in his victorious pro-
gress, approached the German frontiers was he
drawn into the maelstrom of the great German
War. For sixty-three years had Germany, as in
a dream, lived at peace under the ^gis of the
Augsburg Confession -- a false peace, for it gave
no satisfaction to the heart, and left imsolved all
the great contested questions of our imperial law.
Looking on idly, acquiescing in these stormy
quarrels of the Lutheran and Calvinistic theo-
logians, the Protestants of Germany had watched
the Jesuits leading back in time of peace, now
through cunning and now through force, whole
areas of the South and of the West into the Romish
Church; they had looked on whilst in the Burgund-
ian region of the Empire, at the mouth of the
great German river, the Dutch had waged a
desperate war against the world-wide Monarchy of
the Hapsburgs; they had heard the warning of
William of Orange: "If Germany remains an inert
spectator of our tragedy, a war will assuredly
break out on her own soil in comparison with
which all previous wars will seem a trifle! " Now
the prophecy was fulfilled. The most terrible of
all wars began, terrible not merely through the
savagery of the armies engaged in the struggle, but
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? 270 Germany's Protestant Freedom
also through its lack of ideal aims; for in this
unhappy Empire, tossed to and fro among four
factions, religious and political contrasts became
involved in a hopeless confusion, and of the lofty
passions of the early days of the Reformation
there remained hardly anything beyond obscure
and evil-minded ecclesiastical hatred.
The two lines of the House of Hapsburg, the
Austrian and the Spanish, made common cause
against heresy; they allied themselves with Maxi-
milian of Bavaria, the leader of the German Catho-
lic League, with the Italian Princes,, and with the
Crown of Poland. Almost the whole of European
Catholicism, France alone excepted, employed its
mercenary troops in the service of this imperial
policy, which, firm, cool-handed, and favoured by
fortune, advanced towards its goal, arousing the
admiration even of Gustavus Adolphus by the
relentless force of its will. "The Emperor,"
said Gustavus more than once, "is a great states-
man, and does everything that turns to his own
advantage. " As a speedy result, all the heredi-
tary dominions of the Emperor, not excepting
Bohemia, the ancient home of heresy, and the
Protestant peasantry of Upper Austria, returned
to the Roman fold. South Germany was sub-
dued, the Elector Palatine was driven from his
country and his people; the Spaniards occupied
a chain of fortresses along the Rhine, and were
thus enabled to send troops safely from Milan,
by way of the Tyrol and through Germany, to
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 271
attack the Netherlands. Next, the small armies
of the Protestant leaders of the North were routed,
and at length the Danish Prince was driven out of
Holstein. As in the days ' of the Othos, the
Emperor's troops penetrated even into Jutland.
The imperial flag, bearing the double eagle and the
image of the Virgin, waved victoriously along
the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. Wal-
lenstein, the Czech Commander-in-Chief of the im-
perial forces, was already laying the foundations of
a sea-power, wishing, by means of a canal between
Wismar and the Elbe, to unite the Baltic with the
North Sea, and proposing to found an imperial
harbour at Jahdebusen, at the very door of the
Dutch rebels, where Wilhelmshaven now stands.
In the year 1629, the imperial policy uttered
its last word. The Restitution Edict excluded
the members of the Reformed Churches from the
toleration of the Augsburg Confession, and decreed
that all the ecclesiastical foundations which since
the date of the Augsburg Confession had belonged
to the Evangelical Church, all the great immediate
bishoprics of the old Germania sacra of the North,
Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Bremen, and Liibeck,
the prince-bishoprics of Meissen, Brandenburg,
and many others, should revert to the Roman
dominion. What a prospect! The peaceful
development of two generations was to be swept
away by this arbitrary decree. The Protestant
inhabitants of these old ecclesiastical areas were
once more to be subjected to the rule of the crosier,
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? 272 Germany's Protestant Freedom
and an Archduke was to reign at Magdeburg as
Catholic Archbishop! Had these measures been
carried out, the very roots of German Protestant-
ism would have been cut away, alike politically and
ecclesiastically; Protestantism would, in fact, have
been completely annihilated; and further, the
Princely Houses of the Empire attached to the
reformed doctrine, those of Brandenburg, of Hesse,
of the Palatinate, and of the Anhalts of Ascania,
would have been deprived of their dominions as
rebels and heretics ; and indeed the Mecklenburgs,
the Brunswicks, and numerous other Protestant
Princes, had already fallen into misery, and had
been forced to surrender their lands to the military
chiefs of the Empire. Never was our Fatherland
so near to the attainment of unity, and Wallenstein
had voiced the threat that there was no longer any
need of Princes and Electors. But the unity that
would thus have been imposed by the Spanish
priests of the Society of Jesus, by condottieri
and mercenary soldiers owning allegiance to no
fatherland of their own, would have destroyed
all freedom of spirit, would have annihilated our
German ego. A cry of horror arose from the entire
Protestant world. But whence could any help
come? The lands of the only two Protestant
Princes who still wore the electoral ermine, those of
Brandenburg and Saxony, were overrun by the
imperial armies. Moreover, both these Electors
were paralyzed, their wills were divided, they were
influenced by the traditional spirit of allegiance to
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 273
the Emperor, a spirit admirable even if mistaken ;
they were paral^^zed by the undisciplined state
of their principalities, rendering impossible the
eflPective levying of troops. There was no hope
here. Such was the dissension among the German
Protestants, so absolute was their ineffectiveness,
that help could come from a foreign Power alone.
The King of Sweden was left no other choice.
He was well acquainted with the general state of
European affairs ; he had long vainly endeavoured
to induce the Protestant Powers of Northern
Europe that still remained free -- England, Hol-
land, and Denmark -- to form a league against
the Hapsburgs; once already, during his Polish
campaign, he had fought unsuccessfully with
the imperial troops on the heath of Stuhm. If
the power of the licentious imperial soldiery
were to be extended yet farther along the Baltic,
not only would his dream of a great Northern
monarchy be shattered, but even his existing
small kingdom would be endangered, for unques-
tionably in that case the Polish Vasas who were
allied with Austria would endeavour to reconquer
the vSwedish Crown. "It is by the safety of our
neighbours," said Gustavus to his faithful sup-
porters, " that we must secure our own. " In fiery
words he added -- he who had never learned to
play the hypocrite^ -- "I will liberate my oppressed
fellow-believers from the Papal yoke. " Political
duty and religious duty called to him with one
voice. In the outcome, as always when decisions
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? 274 Germany*s Protestant Freedom
of world-historical importance are in question, we
note the half -hidden working of genius, the secret
conviction of fateful consequences and of divine
inspiration.
In July, 1630, he landed on Riigen, just one
hundred years after the Protestants of Germany
had made their Confession of Faith. That forlorn
widow, the Augsburg Confession, had at length
found her consoler. Yet almost a whole year
elapsed before the Princes of North Germany could
overcome their fear of the Emperor and their mis-
trust of the foreign helper. A shining figure,
inspired by heroic confidence, did Gustavus appear
among these timorous hesitants. "I tell you that
no middle course is possible," he repeats again
and again in his speeches; **the Rubicon is crossed,
the die is cast; the fight is between God and the
devil, and there is no third side. What sort of
a thing is neutrality? I know not the word! "
Slowly pushing his way forward in a laborious
campaign, which long afterwards aroused the pro-
found admiration of Napoleon, he penetrated with
his little army into Pomerania and the Mark, receiv-
ing secret financial aid from France, but being all
the while extremely careful to keep this dangerous
neighbour from more active intervention in the
German war. A diplomatic turn of events at the
Imperial Court at length brought some clearness
into the confusion. Wallenstein, the worldly
warrior, who wished all priests at the devil, desired
to come to terms with Sweden, to get the German
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 275
Protestants on his side, by restricting the appli-
cation of the Restitution Edict, and then to use
the combined forces of Austria, Spain, and united
Germany against CathoHc France and the Pro-
testant Netherlands, in order to extend the
Hapsburg dominion over the whole of Latin
Europe. The Catholic League, on the other
hand, and the clerical party at the Viennese Court,
demanded the uprooting of the North German
heresy, and unrelenting warfare against North
Germany's Swedish allies.
? 250 Luther and the German Nation
but it was Upper Germany which contributed the
mighty language which was from thenceforth
to hold moral sway over evangelical Germany.
These districts of Southern and Middle Germany
have from time immemorial been the warm cradle
of our poetry, and also of our linguistic develop-
ment. And this High German was the language of
Luther's own home. Its accents had been dear to
him from earliest childhood, and he had heard
them from the lips of the people in the mines at
Mansfeld, the quarry-men employed by his dear
father. Goethe alone has rivalled him in his com-
mand over language; but, notwithstanding this
eloquence, he remains the most "popular" of all
our writers. His works combine in themselves
elements usually believed to be incompatible.
They show deep thought, close compression of
matter, all-compelling argument, and an immense
prodigality of magnificent words, so that the
reader seems to hear the heartfelt accents of the
preacher himself. Their gift to the imaginative
is immense, and the meditative are left with endless
food for thought. This language of freedom and
truth, born as it was in the midst of wars, cannot
deny the tokens of its origin to this day. It is a
language created to voice mighty wrath, to sport
and jest, to storm the pinnacles of thought, to
gently whisper the inmost secrets of the heart.
But let a man once seek to drive or coerce our
mother tongue to hide its meaning, to make treach-
erous and biting salHes, or even to pander to an
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? Luther and the German Nation 251
uneducated craving for the charming and the
piquant, and he will get but little from it; such a
person will find himself obliged to go and beg at the
table of strangers.
More than a hundred years elapsed before this
new German, which shed a glory over the hymns
and sermons of the Evangelical Church, became
the common property of our people. Learning
then became popular and worldly in its turn, and
our ancestors saw the fulfilment of the saying
which Ulrich von Hutten had proclaimed aloud
to the world in the very first days of the nation's
rapturous hope: ''Formerly the priests alone were
learned; now God has given skill to all to read
and understand. " About the middle of the six-
teenth century a sad and paralyzing influence
descended on the Lutheran branch of German
Protestantism, for little beside the solemn strains
of the evangelical hymns was left to remind men
what the original spirit of the Reformation had
been, and ambitious theologians, in the old and the
new Church alike, sought to determine the direc-
tion and limitations of study. It was only the
heroic courage of the vigorous sister church in the
Netherlands, and the struggle of the Calvinists
there against Spain, that preserved a degenerate
Lutherism from certain destruction. Not until we
experienced the miseries of the Thirty Years' War
did we realize the real trend of affairs. The
Pietists of Halle roused once again in our people
the vital spirit of the gospels, the spirit of brotherly
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? 252 Luther and the German Nation
love, which sought to make the evangelical life a
reality, and which the barren and unprofitable
quarrels of the last few decades had obscured.
Pufendorf drove the theologians out of the domain
of political science; Thomasius was the first to dare
to speak German from a German professorial
chair. And on the soil thus prepared there at once
grew up our new learning and our new poetry, free
from all the harshness consequent on a religious
bias, fundamentally worldly, far bolder in its con-
ceptions than any theories ever sanctioned by
Luther, but still perfectly Protestant. All the
leaders of this new learning were Protestants.
The new ideal of humanity could proceed only from
the autonomy of the conscience won for us by
Luther. The Bavarian Jesuits were horrified
on hearing the "Lutheran German" of this new
culture, but none the less it continued its peace-
ful march of victory even through Catholic
Germany, until it had at last drawn all things
German into the fresh stream of its ideals. And
we may recognize with pride to-day that even the
champions of Rome from among our countrymen
long ago learnt ''Lutheran German," and that
they fight against us with swords forged on our
own anvils.
Honest worldly activity did not receive any
moral justification until the Church's activities
were entirely limited to spiritual matters. This
period saw the solution of the riddle which had
seemed insolvable to the mediaeval poet; riches
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? Luther and the German Nation 253
and honour were now found to be perfectly com-
patible with the grace of God. Eternity itself
now entered the sphere of the believer's material
life, and he began to feel that he could and must do
service by means of his handiwork. Even the
soldiers received from Luther the comfortable
assurance that they too would be in a state of
salvation if they sought to perform their hard
duties faithfully. But as soon as it was seen that
a Church could exist without clergy, it became
impossible for the clergy even in purely Catholic
countries, to persist in claiming to be the highest
order in the social scale. In Germany the middle
strata of society, to which Luther had chiefly
addressed himself, became ever more and more the
elite of the nation. Moreover, the determining
power which education and culture, and iinfor-
tunately also doctrinarianism, wield in German
life to this day had its origin in the achievements
of the greatest of German professors.
Protestantism is the product of a robust and
virile century which cared little for women, and the
sobriety of the outward forms of its worship do not
always satisfy the pious longings of the female
heart. Yet Luther raised the German women to a
higher level than that occupied by them in the days
when the merciful Mother of God was invoked.
The woman's domain, the home, was brought into
high honour by him before God and man. It was
not without a hard struggle that he took courage
to woo his Kate; the scales were finally turned
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? 254 Luther and the German Nation
not only by a desire for domestic bliss, but also
by a sense of a sacred duty to be performed. How
often he cried out to monks and nuns, "Who
commanded you to pledge yourselves to a life that
is contrary to God and to His laws, and to swear
that you are not men and women? ** If he was
justified in putting this question, if matrimon}^ was
really a holy state, and better pleasing to God than
the vow of the tonsured, it became incumbent upon
him to testify to the truth of his teaching in his own
person. He knew what a muddy tide of base and
disgusting insinuations would roll up against him,
whose spotless name had hitherto been as a shield
to a great cause and had withstood all the darts
of the slanderers. He took to himself this cross of
his own free will, for the moral force of evangelical
truth could not be demonstrated more victoriously
or convincingly than in the marriage of an escaped
monk and an escaped nun who thereby set
an example to thousands of pious people.
This marriage did, indeed, form an example.
This family, laden with all the curses of Rome,
lives in all our hearts to-day. We think of it on
Christmas Eve, in front of the Christmas-tree,
when the fresh voices of our children proclaim the
joyful tidings, "From high heaven I am come. '*
We see the old professor, the spiritual adviser of
his dear Germans, dealing out help and comfort
and instruction to all the doubting and the heavy
laden who flock to him from far and near; we see
him, strong in the possession of a free mind, ever on
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? Luther and the German Nation 255
the side of nature, of the heart, of equity, and of
love. We hear his hearty laugh as he speaks
strong words of encouragement to the timorous
Melanchthon, or praises the greatness of his small
Greek with the unenvious enthusiasm of a friend.
We enjoy his golden mood when in the evening he
passes the goblet round his hospitable table, where
my lady Music, the most German of the arts, has
her place among the many tipplers.
No ill intent can harboured be
Where men sing in good company.
We mourn with him when he is overcome by the
most human of griefs, and weeps at the bier of his
little Lena. Such was the first evangelical parson-
age. And how many tears have since been dried
by our country pastors' wives, and how many good
and clever men have since been brought up in the
learned though not unnatural atmosphere of these
peaceful homes !
All our actions are but piecework, and history
records the name of no man who was not greater
than his work. The most priceless legacy be-
queathed by Luther to our people is, after all, the
legacy of himself and of the life-giving might of his
heaven-inspired mind. None among the other
modern nations can boast of a man who was the
mouthpiece of his countrymen in quite the same
way, and who succeeded as fully in giving expres-
sion to the innermost character of his nation. A
stranger may inquire in bewilderment how it was
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? 256 Luther and the German Nation
possible for such striking contrasts to show them-
selves in the same human soul. Men wonder how
it was possible to combine a capacity for towering
anger with a pious and sincere belief, high wisdom
with childlike simplicity, deep mysticism with
heartfelt enjoyment of life, uncouthness and rough-
ness with the tenderest goodness of heart; they
marvel that the tremendous personage who ended
a letter to his un-grace, Duke George of Saxony,
with the words, "Martin Luther, by the grace of
God evangelist at Wittenberg," could then kneel
humbly in the dust before God. We Germans are
not puzzled by these apparent contradictions; all
we say is, " Here speaks our own blood. ' ' From the
deep eyes of this uncouth son of a German farmer
there flashed the ancient and heroic courage of
the Germanic races -- a courage which does not flee
from the world, but rather seeks to dominate it
by the strength of its moral purpose. And just
because he gave utterance to ideas already living
in the soul of his nation, this poor monk, who had
but lately made his humble pilgrimage from the
Augustinian monastery, on Monte Pincio, to the
halls of St. Peter, was able to grow and develop
very rapidly, until he had become as dangerous
to the new Roman universal empire as the assailing
German hordes were to the empire of the Caesars.
One generation after Luther, four fifths of our
people belonged to the evangelical religion. In
most of the districts of Germany, ruled by the
Roman Church to-day, she owes her restoration to
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? Luther and the German Nation 257
the argument of the sword, and almost everywhere
where the Gospel was violently stamped out, the
German spirit languishes even now as if one of its
wings had been broken. In the districts where
German population is in close and unfriendly con-
tact with our alien race, Protestantism has ever
been our safest frontier guard. In our North-
eastern provinces, German and Protestant, Polish
and Roman Catholic have long been regarded as
synonymous terms, and of all the German races
in Austria none has remained as faithful to its
nationality as the Protestant Saxon population
of Siebenburgen.
It would well become us at this festival, when the
reformer stands in person in our midst, to remember
the warning which he once gave to his Germans:
*' God's Word and grace is a driving thunderstorm,
which does not return over ground once covered.
It visited the Jews, but is now past, and they have
nothing of it left. Paul brought it to Greece.
It passed away there too, and now they have
nought but the Turks. Rome and the Latian land
were likewise blessed; now they have lost it, and
the Pope alone remains. And you Germans
must not think that you will keep it for ever, for
ingratitude and contempt will drive it hence. Let
him therefore that can, seize what he can ; slothful
hands will reap a bad harvest. " The same de-
structive powers which once stemmed the natural
progress of the Reformation are still among us
to-day, although their form is changed. Who has
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? 258 Luther and the German Nation
not noted the unloving disagreement among
believers, the fleshly gospel of factious spirits,
and the impudent self -righteousness of the epi-
cureans, as Luther called them?
But these blemishes are thrown into the shade by
the more consoling signs which are not wanting
in our age. A sense of deep and organic relation-
ship binds the present to the age of Luther. It
compels the artist to readopt almost unconsciously
the architectural forms of the sixteenth century,
and it drives the scholar to carry his researches
into the heart of that stormy period. Many things,
only dimly divined in Luther's day, have been
developed and completed in ours. The new world,
then discovered, has only lately made its entry
into history, and its most promising and fruitful
countries belong to the evangelical religion. Far
away on the Pacific there are pious hearts full of
the remembrance of the country where once was
rocked the cradle of Martin Luther. The art of
printing has only lately revealed itself as a link
able to bind nation to nation.
The unity of Germany and Italy stands secure,
and the transformation of our German ecclesiasti-
cal princedoms was followed by the destruction of
the last and worst of the ecclesiastical dominations,
the Pontifical State. Freedom of thought and
belief has been assured to all the nations of the
civilized world, and in the Evangelical Church a
vigorous and unbroken continuity of life still
manifests itself. The disunion to be observed in it
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? Luther and the German Nation 259
is but an indication of the fact that religion has a
firmer hold on all hearts to-day than it had in the
days of o\ir first enlightenment. But in the midst
of the dissensions the Evangelical Church has won
two peaceful victories at least : she has united the
contending sister Churches of Protestantism in an
evangelical union, and she is now engaged in the
task of developing in her constitution the almost
vanished idea of a congregational system.
The period is one of great blessing, and no
Protestant must give up hoping that even happier
days will come, when our entire nation will honour
Martin Luther as its hero and its teacher. The
fact that the Reformation was not universal in its
results on our country was, as we know, a very
salutary one. If it had triumphed everywhere and
held undisputed sway, the Evangelical Church
could hardly have given free play to that spirit
of humane and broad-minded tolerance which rules
German life to-day. Still the period when ecclesi-
astical differences brought a blessing is now over.
Since the Roman Church has spoken her last word
in proclaiming the infaUibility of the Pope, we feel
more acutely than ever how great is the gulf which
separates the different members of our race. To
span this gulf, to infuse evangelical Christianity
with sufficient vitaHty to enable it to rule our
entire nation -- this is a task which we recognize
as ours, and which later generations will one
day accomplish. This one purpose can never be
fulfilled if we are faint-hearted and descend the
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? 26o Luther and the German Nation
mountain which our courageous fathers climbed in
the sweat of their brow; for never again shall a
priest-ridden Church assemble Luther's com-
patriots round its altars. They will follow no
Church which does not recognize the evangelical
freedom of the Christian, the independence of the
believing and repentant conscience, and which
seeks to interfere with the just rights and functions
of the moral forces of the world, notably the
State. Protestantism has already victoriously
tided over more difficult periods than ours. How
many of us to-day have ancestors who fought for
the gospel at the White Mountain or at Lutzen, or
who ate the bread of banishment for the sake
of their religion ! On this birthday of the Reformer
let us thankfully and bravely raise our voices in
the words of his high-hearted hymn :
And if grief last until the night,
And then again till dawn,
Yet shall my heart aye trust in God
And His almighty power.
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? GUSTAVUS ADOLPHUS AND GERMANY'S
FREEDOM
{A Lecture Delivered at the Sing Academy in
Berlin, December, i8g4)
WHEREVER on German soil the song is heard,
"Eine feste Burg ist Unser Gott,"^ with
pious affection thoughts are turned to the com-
memoration of the day which gave to us the saviour
of our Protestant freedom. Yet it comes as a pain-
ful echo of the civil strife of former days when we
realize that a part only of the nation can co-oper-
ate in this festival, and that many of our valiant
countrymen even detest it as treasonable. For
our own part, we will not allow our joy in the
Northern hero to be disturbed by the fact that he
was a foreigner, nor because it was in the darkest
days of our country's past that his star blazed
in the ascendant. In sharp contrast with the
national narrowness of classical antiquity, we find
in the history of the Christian peoples an unending
give and take, a continuous interlacing of general
European interests, wherein the ideals of human-
ity are harmonized with the separate aims of the
' '* God is to us a tower of strength. "
261
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? 262 Germany's Protestant Freedom
nations.
The wealth and beauty of European his-
tory are constituted by this variegated drama,
wherein the free brother peoples of Europe are
seen, now hating, shunning, or fighting one an-
other, now joining hands to work for common
ends. Even the insular kingdom of Britain, more
inclined than all others to reject what is of foreign
origin, has twice in its history owed a decisive
turn of fate to the benevolent hand of a foreigner.
The Frenchman, Simon de Montfort, was the
creator of the British House of Commons, and
was the first of all men to gain the honourable
name of Protector of the English people ; the Dutch-
man, William of Orange, secured for the English
their existing parliamentary government.
Gustavus Adolphus' own home had early
experienced alike the blessings and the curse of
foreign domination. It was by Germany that this
hitherto untouched region of Northern heroes was
won for Christendom, and was incorporated within
the community of the Latin moral world-order.
The German Hanseatic League shut off the
Scandinavian coast from world-trade, and with
the overwhelming power due to its command of
capital was able so harshly to oppress the economic
forces of the young nations of the North that the
three Northern capitals, Stockholm, Copenhagen,
and Bergen, became German harbours, and for a
time even the tenure of the crowns in the Scandi-
navian lands became subject to the approval of the
league of German merchants. In the sixteenth
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 263
century, when the power of the Hanseatic League
declined, there ensued an inevitable reaction
against the foreign German dominion. "All
through God and the Swedish peasantry," thus
was worded the summons to revolt issued to his
Dalecarlians by Gustavus Vasa, the grandfather
of Gustavus Adolphus. Throwing off at once the
Danish yoke, and the yoke of the German mer-
chants, he founded in Sweden a new national
kingdom. Ardent, rejoicing in action, highly
cultured, ever receptive of new ideas, such was the
wild brood of the Vasa; stormy was its passage
through life, often burning its very self in the
flames of its own passions. Undying was the love
of the Swedes for the House of their great Liberator.
At a later date, when there was a failure of the
male line, and when the dynasty was represented
only by the Countesses Palatine and other female
descendants, they refused to allow the name of
the Vasa, and the ears of wheat emblematic of the
line, to be erased from the Swedish coat-of-arms.
At this time, however, when our commercial
supremacy in Scandinavia collapsed, Germany's
thoughts again turned victoriously towards the
North. Gustavus Vasa became a Protestant,
and partitioned the excessive wealth of the old
Church between the Crown and the nobles in such
a manner that the power of the Vasas must hence-
forward stand or fall with the Lutheran Church.
Not here, as in Germany, did the change to Pro-
testantism aiise freely from the conscience of the
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? 264 Germany's Protestant Freedom
people; as in England, it was imposed upon the
nation by a powerful royal house, which, gradually
at first, and then with heart and soul, adopted
the evangelical faith. Thus it came to pass that
Germany, the land ecclesiastically divided by the
Reformation, stood from now onwards between
the Catholic world of the Romans and the strict
Lutheranism of the North. The alliance between
the Swedish Crown and the Lutheran Church be-
came yet more firmly cemented when the grand-
son of Gustavus Vasa, King Sigismund, the elected
King of Poland, reverted to the Roman Church,
and was in consequence driven from the country
after a confused and fiercely contested civil
war. Thereupon the youngest son of Gustavus
Vasa, the father of Gustavus Adolphus, was raised
to the forcibly evacuated throne, under the style
of King Charles IX. He was a severe and rigid
man of affairs, like his father a king of the poor
people, and a protector of Protestantism. Very
soon a threefold war broke out in this unhappy
country, whose enormous area was at this date
populated by barely a million inhabitants, whose
more prosperous southern provinces of Schonen
and Blekingen were still occupied by the Danish
enemies, and which could carry on free intercourse
with the rest of Europe only through a single
North Sea port, alone unhampered by the Danish
Sound-dues. The expelled King in Cracow de-
manded his restoration to the throne; Poland,
Russia, and Denmark were beginning their great
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 265
struggle for the inheritance of the fallen Hansa
power, and for the dominion of the Baltic. Such
was the stress of events when the old King, whose
end was approaching, pointed to his youthful
successor with the words: '' Ilk faciei; he will deal
with it all! "
To nations, as to men of genius, there comes an
hour in which an inner voice speaks to them,
saying, ''Now or never shalt thou manifest thy
best, thy most individual, qualities to the world. "
From the first moment of the reign of Gustavus
Adolphus the Swedish people was animated by a
clear, joyful, and ever-increasing consciousness of
victory. The introspective Lutheran doctrine,
which elsewhere so often led its adherents to
passive obedience, and to a withdrawal from the
struggles of political life, became here, upon this
Northern soil, contentious, like its more vigorous
sister, Calvinism ; and soon from every pulpit went
forth the prophecy that this Gustavus was to be
the Augustus of the Protestant North. A man
altogether after the people's heart was this lad
of seventeen, blond, with shining blue eyes, over-
topping by half a head his tall fellow-countrymen,
serene-spirited and filled with the joy of life,
simple with the simplicity of the old North-land --
for how often did he wait good-humouredly with
his companions for the frozen wine to thaw in the
goblets! -- a master in the art of speech, and if
need should arise a master also in the moving and
homely eloquence of his grandfather. A careful
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? 266 Germany's Protestant Freedom
education had introduced the boy, precocious in
development and avid of learning, to the whole
range of the culture of his time. And yet, as soon
became manifest to all, his heart was in the pro-
-- % fession of arms. Pictures of battle and of victory
chased one another through his dreams. He
rejoiced to know that in his own veins ran pure
the blood of the Gothic heroes. Inseparably and
indistinguishably interfused in his mind with this
warlike national pride was the serious fervour of
his Lutheran creed. The great memories of the
House of Vasa, the close relationship with the old
Protestant races of Brandenburg, Holstein, Hesse,
and the Palatinate, the campaign against his
Catholic cousin in Poland, the general position
of Sweden in the world -- all forced him into the
Protestant camp. With kingly glance surveying
the religious struggles of the time, he asked only
that the Churches, no longer able to control one
another by force, should rather learn the lesson
of mutual toleration. But he was not one like
Richelieu, or Wallenstein, to regard the Church as
a mere means to political ends; he lived by the
Protestant faith, he knew the power of prayer,
and with full heart he sang, Verzage nicht, du
Hduflein klein. ^ The ardour and sincerity of his
religious belief remind us of the men of a day long
past, of the leaders of the League of Schmalkald,
John Frederick of Saxony and Philip of Hesse,
were it not that in Gustavus Adolphus the might of
^ "Never despair, you little band. "
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 267
faith awakened, not the patience of the martyr, but
the activity of the hero.
With the aid of his youthful Chancellor, Oxen-
stiern, torn as his country was by civil war, the
King grounded within a few years the best-ordered
hierarchical monarchy of his day. Lagerquist-
Lorbeerzweig, Oernfiycht-Adelfiucht, Erenrot-
Ehrenwurzel -- such were the proud names of the
noble houses which here in Sweden, as throughout
the aristocratic world around the shores of the
Baltic, unwillingly bent their stiff necks before the
power of the Monarchy. With astonishing speed
were the members of this iron-handed aristocracy
won for the service of the Crown by the lure of
renown and booty ; every nobleman who in time of
war remained at home to guard his own kitchen-
midden was deprived of his crown-fief. For this
reason it was possible to impose also upon the
faithful peasantry the heavy burden of military ser-
vice ; every year the clergy announced from their
pulpits the names of the young men who were
summoned for duty. The general administration
of the country was conducted by the King through
the intermediation of five great local boards. Free
deliberation was permitted to the four orders of his
Reichstag, but once the King had made his own
decision he demanded absolute obedience, for, as
he phrased it, "no laurels of war can flourish in an
atmosphere of eternal dispute. " Thus sure of
his own people, he undertook to bring to an end
the three wars left him as a legacy by his father.
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? 268 Germany's Protestant Freedom
and in nineteen years' campaigning built up for
himself an army accustomed to victory. Only
with much labour was he able to enforce a supe-
riority over the Danes. Thereupon, turning to at-
tack the most dangerous enemy of all, he directed
himself against the Muscovites; driving the
Russians from their robbers' nest on the Baltic, he
conquered Ingermanland [now the governmental
area of Petrograd] and Karelia [South-eastern
Finland], the whole bordering country of the Gulf
of Finland, and in the neighbourhood of the
modern Petersburg he erected the column which
announces to the world that here Gustavus Adol-
phus established the boundary of his kingdom.
He then led his devoted followers against the
Poles, and here for the first time encountered
the armed forces of the counter-Reformation. To
the kingdom of Poland, hitherto rejoicing in vic-
tory, he brought the first great defeat of two
centuries, conquering Livonia, securing for the
Protestant Church its threatened possessions, and
establishing his power in the seaports of Prussia.
More and more clearly was now manifested the
leading idea of his life, the foundation of a great
Scandinavian Empire, which should unite under
the blue and yellow flag of Sweden all the
dominions of the Baltic Sea.
These manifold successes fell to the arms of
Gustavus Adolphus without any interference
upon the part of the Powers of the West, for no
states-system was yet in existence. The region of
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 269
Central Europe, this Germany of ours, destined in
a future day to unite the East and the West of
Europe into a Hving Society of States, lay now
prostrate, bleeding from a thousand wounds, torn
asunder by a fierce struggle of factions; and only
when Gustavus Adolphus, in his victorious pro-
gress, approached the German frontiers was he
drawn into the maelstrom of the great German
War. For sixty-three years had Germany, as in
a dream, lived at peace under the ^gis of the
Augsburg Confession -- a false peace, for it gave
no satisfaction to the heart, and left imsolved all
the great contested questions of our imperial law.
Looking on idly, acquiescing in these stormy
quarrels of the Lutheran and Calvinistic theo-
logians, the Protestants of Germany had watched
the Jesuits leading back in time of peace, now
through cunning and now through force, whole
areas of the South and of the West into the Romish
Church; they had looked on whilst in the Burgund-
ian region of the Empire, at the mouth of the
great German river, the Dutch had waged a
desperate war against the world-wide Monarchy of
the Hapsburgs; they had heard the warning of
William of Orange: "If Germany remains an inert
spectator of our tragedy, a war will assuredly
break out on her own soil in comparison with
which all previous wars will seem a trifle! " Now
the prophecy was fulfilled. The most terrible of
all wars began, terrible not merely through the
savagery of the armies engaged in the struggle, but
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? 270 Germany's Protestant Freedom
also through its lack of ideal aims; for in this
unhappy Empire, tossed to and fro among four
factions, religious and political contrasts became
involved in a hopeless confusion, and of the lofty
passions of the early days of the Reformation
there remained hardly anything beyond obscure
and evil-minded ecclesiastical hatred.
The two lines of the House of Hapsburg, the
Austrian and the Spanish, made common cause
against heresy; they allied themselves with Maxi-
milian of Bavaria, the leader of the German Catho-
lic League, with the Italian Princes,, and with the
Crown of Poland. Almost the whole of European
Catholicism, France alone excepted, employed its
mercenary troops in the service of this imperial
policy, which, firm, cool-handed, and favoured by
fortune, advanced towards its goal, arousing the
admiration even of Gustavus Adolphus by the
relentless force of its will. "The Emperor,"
said Gustavus more than once, "is a great states-
man, and does everything that turns to his own
advantage. " As a speedy result, all the heredi-
tary dominions of the Emperor, not excepting
Bohemia, the ancient home of heresy, and the
Protestant peasantry of Upper Austria, returned
to the Roman fold. South Germany was sub-
dued, the Elector Palatine was driven from his
country and his people; the Spaniards occupied
a chain of fortresses along the Rhine, and were
thus enabled to send troops safely from Milan,
by way of the Tyrol and through Germany, to
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 271
attack the Netherlands. Next, the small armies
of the Protestant leaders of the North were routed,
and at length the Danish Prince was driven out of
Holstein. As in the days ' of the Othos, the
Emperor's troops penetrated even into Jutland.
The imperial flag, bearing the double eagle and the
image of the Virgin, waved victoriously along
the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea. Wal-
lenstein, the Czech Commander-in-Chief of the im-
perial forces, was already laying the foundations of
a sea-power, wishing, by means of a canal between
Wismar and the Elbe, to unite the Baltic with the
North Sea, and proposing to found an imperial
harbour at Jahdebusen, at the very door of the
Dutch rebels, where Wilhelmshaven now stands.
In the year 1629, the imperial policy uttered
its last word. The Restitution Edict excluded
the members of the Reformed Churches from the
toleration of the Augsburg Confession, and decreed
that all the ecclesiastical foundations which since
the date of the Augsburg Confession had belonged
to the Evangelical Church, all the great immediate
bishoprics of the old Germania sacra of the North,
Magdeburg, Halberstadt, Bremen, and Liibeck,
the prince-bishoprics of Meissen, Brandenburg,
and many others, should revert to the Roman
dominion. What a prospect! The peaceful
development of two generations was to be swept
away by this arbitrary decree. The Protestant
inhabitants of these old ecclesiastical areas were
once more to be subjected to the rule of the crosier,
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? 272 Germany's Protestant Freedom
and an Archduke was to reign at Magdeburg as
Catholic Archbishop! Had these measures been
carried out, the very roots of German Protestant-
ism would have been cut away, alike politically and
ecclesiastically; Protestantism would, in fact, have
been completely annihilated; and further, the
Princely Houses of the Empire attached to the
reformed doctrine, those of Brandenburg, of Hesse,
of the Palatinate, and of the Anhalts of Ascania,
would have been deprived of their dominions as
rebels and heretics ; and indeed the Mecklenburgs,
the Brunswicks, and numerous other Protestant
Princes, had already fallen into misery, and had
been forced to surrender their lands to the military
chiefs of the Empire. Never was our Fatherland
so near to the attainment of unity, and Wallenstein
had voiced the threat that there was no longer any
need of Princes and Electors. But the unity that
would thus have been imposed by the Spanish
priests of the Society of Jesus, by condottieri
and mercenary soldiers owning allegiance to no
fatherland of their own, would have destroyed
all freedom of spirit, would have annihilated our
German ego. A cry of horror arose from the entire
Protestant world. But whence could any help
come? The lands of the only two Protestant
Princes who still wore the electoral ermine, those of
Brandenburg and Saxony, were overrun by the
imperial armies. Moreover, both these Electors
were paralyzed, their wills were divided, they were
influenced by the traditional spirit of allegiance to
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 273
the Emperor, a spirit admirable even if mistaken ;
they were paral^^zed by the undisciplined state
of their principalities, rendering impossible the
eflPective levying of troops. There was no hope
here. Such was the dissension among the German
Protestants, so absolute was their ineffectiveness,
that help could come from a foreign Power alone.
The King of Sweden was left no other choice.
He was well acquainted with the general state of
European affairs ; he had long vainly endeavoured
to induce the Protestant Powers of Northern
Europe that still remained free -- England, Hol-
land, and Denmark -- to form a league against
the Hapsburgs; once already, during his Polish
campaign, he had fought unsuccessfully with
the imperial troops on the heath of Stuhm. If
the power of the licentious imperial soldiery
were to be extended yet farther along the Baltic,
not only would his dream of a great Northern
monarchy be shattered, but even his existing
small kingdom would be endangered, for unques-
tionably in that case the Polish Vasas who were
allied with Austria would endeavour to reconquer
the vSwedish Crown. "It is by the safety of our
neighbours," said Gustavus to his faithful sup-
porters, " that we must secure our own. " In fiery
words he added -- he who had never learned to
play the hypocrite^ -- "I will liberate my oppressed
fellow-believers from the Papal yoke. " Political
duty and religious duty called to him with one
voice. In the outcome, as always when decisions
18
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? 274 Germany*s Protestant Freedom
of world-historical importance are in question, we
note the half -hidden working of genius, the secret
conviction of fateful consequences and of divine
inspiration.
In July, 1630, he landed on Riigen, just one
hundred years after the Protestants of Germany
had made their Confession of Faith. That forlorn
widow, the Augsburg Confession, had at length
found her consoler. Yet almost a whole year
elapsed before the Princes of North Germany could
overcome their fear of the Emperor and their mis-
trust of the foreign helper. A shining figure,
inspired by heroic confidence, did Gustavus appear
among these timorous hesitants. "I tell you that
no middle course is possible," he repeats again
and again in his speeches; **the Rubicon is crossed,
the die is cast; the fight is between God and the
devil, and there is no third side. What sort of
a thing is neutrality? I know not the word! "
Slowly pushing his way forward in a laborious
campaign, which long afterwards aroused the pro-
found admiration of Napoleon, he penetrated with
his little army into Pomerania and the Mark, receiv-
ing secret financial aid from France, but being all
the while extremely careful to keep this dangerous
neighbour from more active intervention in the
German war. A diplomatic turn of events at the
Imperial Court at length brought some clearness
into the confusion. Wallenstein, the worldly
warrior, who wished all priests at the devil, desired
to come to terms with Sweden, to get the German
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? Germany's Protestant Freedom 275
Protestants on his side, by restricting the appli-
cation of the Restitution Edict, and then to use
the combined forces of Austria, Spain, and united
Germany against CathoHc France and the Pro-
testant Netherlands, in order to extend the
Hapsburg dominion over the whole of Latin
Europe. The Catholic League, on the other
hand, and the clerical party at the Viennese Court,
demanded the uprooting of the North German
heresy, and unrelenting warfare against North
Germany's Swedish allies.
