Thus out of the Bible of Germanism cometh the German Sermon on the Mount, as interpreted by Friedrich Nietzsche, prophet of the Superior Soul, by whose Apostolic sword millions of people in the past year have been cut down, bleeding to earth.
But the world even then was blind. It looked on saber-rattling Prussianism not a continuance of the German war-soul developed throughout the ages, but simply as a transient period of political history. For had not the spirit of Christ, in the image of Love and Brotherhood, walked the earth for nineteen centuries, softening men's hearts and tempering men's souls? Could civilized man fall heir to such a spirit and not pay heed? In Germany great cathedrals housed the Cross, but though others did not, German thinkers knew they housed but a great emptiness of soul. For they well knew that the German gods of pagan days were not dead; that they but slept; that even in their slumber they were still charged with a fire inflaming the barbaric instincts of those people.
—77—
