% ''-p *0 •o,. •♦TT,-' iO A '"^ 'il^'. Ao ,0' c,^ ->. CV A ■ • ♦ V5 . -^ .0 ;' .cP %/ .m- \/ .'»^ "-. 7 *0a. O » ' ^ ^^'•f "by ^"^ic. . yyj^i^.^. ..^\^;4-i>X y.:iik:^/^. <».. ^-T^* vv GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE BY GEORGE D. HERRON AUTHOR OF THE MENACE OF PEACE AND WOODROW WILSON AND THE WORLD'S PEACE NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY 1918 COPYRIGHT I918 BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY ^% /IPff 23 I3i8 PRrNTED IN AMERICA ©CU497028 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE EXTRACTS FROM LETTERS An address I gave to the theological stu- dents of Geneva. It seemed to make much impression here, and I have thought the inter- pretation of America which I have made might he of use in America itself. It was given eoo- temporCy and then afterward written out from stenographic notes. I have kept the spoken form. • «•••• I wish you could devise a way of getting it broadcast into the training camps, • ••••• Europe — the world — huma/n destiny for a long time — hangs in the balance. It is a ter- rible moment. Everything depends upon America, and there is no time to be lost. GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE T WOULD be stupid indeed, and false to -*■ my faith in the cause of the Allies as well, were I either to deny or to ignore that this cause has never been so imperilled, nor the condition of Europe so precarious, as at the present moment. Russia, for whom France sacrificed so much, no longer numbers herself among the Allies. Her empire shattered, her momentai^y government in the hands of a Ger- man Socialism, Russia is now, for all prac- tical purposes, co-working with Germany against the liberties of the world. With the release of the German and Austrian armies on the Russian front, and of the prisoners in Rus- sia's hands, the Central Empires will have 4 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE more than a million fresh soldiers to throw against Italy and France. And the Allies have had to come to the de- fence of Italy: the barbarians are within her borders, (ierman aerial wings, laden with maddest murder and destruction, will soon be dropping their burdens upon the babies and basilicas of Venice and Verona and Padua — upon the Padua wherein we Americans walk always softly, and with penitent hearts. And who knows what farther cities — cities sacred to the progress of Christ and of civilization — will also be rendered desolate, their children buried beneath demolished schools, their an- cient arts and altars reduced to dust and ashes? The Germans are in Italy, too, not because of their military superiority, but because of their comprehensive and pervasive propa- ganda among the Italian people — a propa- ganda supported by the intrigue and treach- ery of forces working for Italian disunion and denationalization. The mountain gates that GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 5 admitted the invaders to Italy were opened, alas! by traitor hands. And who can better sympathize with the Italian people than those of us who are proud of an American heritage and citizenship? We remember that we had our own Benedict Arnold in the darkest days of our War for Independence, and that Abra- ham Lincoln fought with treason, both covert and open, from the beginning to the end of our domestic struggle for national self-preser- vation. It is true that the result has been the oppo- site of what Germany planned. The real Italy is now awake: the national soul of this people, to whom civilization owes so much, has once more asserted itself. It is as if Mazzini and Cavour and Garibaldi had returned from the dead. Against overwhelming odds, and with well-nigh miraculous endurance, with heroism that is epic and amazing, the Italian armies are holding back the invader until the Allies can come to their succor in adequate numbers. 6 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE But here is the crux of the present situation. France and England have despatched to Italy an army that was needed for their well-planned offensive on the Western front. In compel- ling the abandonment of that offensive, Ger- many has won a swift and ominous strategic advantage, while at the same time striking the Italian armies at the moment which seemed to promise Italy's obliteration as a fighting force, and her possible reduction to the political con- dition of Russia. And there are other advantages, diplomatic and economic, which Germany may now claim. The resources of Russia are hers : she has only to take them when she wills. Austro-Hun- gary and Turkey are her vassals, and Bulgaria also. Servia and Roumania are beneath her feet. The submarine menace is not less: it may be greater. America will meet the men- ace to-morrow, but to-day the murder which Germany has marshalled upon the high seas increases apace. II nUT there is another and darker advan- -D tage which Germany holds, and it is an advantage more menudng to our essential hu- manity than all the might of her malific arms. Germany is to-day deliberately and system- atically undermining the moral foundations of the world, in order to destroy its resisting power and subdue it unto herself. Nor to- day only: she had plotted this moral pillage of neighbor-nations before the war began— as a preparation for the war indeed. And so suc- cessfully is she now pressing forward her un- clean propaganda, her occult campaigns of se- duction and terrorimtion and coercion, that Ludendorf has publicly boasted of the con- quering results. It is but another and viler war in which Ger- many is thus engaged— a psychic war in fact, 7 8 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE and a war mayhap pregnant with universal de- lusion and disaster ; with the reduction of man- kind, for a time, to a woful condition of spir- itual squalor. It is a war whose weapons are indeed fashioned in hell — a war to remove truth and honor, fidelity and good faith, from political society and the intercourse of nations. It is a war so completely organized, so sinis- ter and bestial, so subterranean and sulphur- ous, that its vast and varied enormities are be- yond the power of non-German men and na- tions to accredit or imagine. So starkly mon- strous its will and its ways are, so corrupting to whoever or whatever becomes the object of its advances, that the world simply will not believe the thing exists. There is no parallel or antecedent for it: there has never been, so far as history knows or reveals, a national mind or method with which the German pene- tration can be compared. Other imperialisms, such as Rome and England, have betimes used bribery and corruption in order to hold sub- ject peoples. But with these prior imperial- GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 9 isms, along with their despotisms and debauch- eries of vassal rulers, went also an element of moral dignity, a degree of moral addition and development, and sometimes a profound re- generation and ennoblement of the conquered tribe or nation. There has been nothing in former imperialist procedure that even ap- proached the spiritual debasement, the polit- ical ruin, that inevitably comes to each people that admits the German to its midst. Julius Csesar's descriptions of German methods, fifty years before the birth of Christ, are as if they were written to-day. He reports the Germans as "that treacherous race which is bred up from the cradle to war and rapine." He speaks bitterly of the Germans who "practise the base deception which first asks for peace and then openly begins war," and declares the Germans to be "outside the pale of negotia- tions." It is upon this darker war, this abominable psychic penetration — ^which she is now extend- ing and intensifying by methods inconceivable 10 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE to any but her own mentality — it is upon this that Germany now stakes her ultimate hopes; upon this, rather than upon her armies, Ger- many depends for the ultimate envelopment and subjection of the world. She pursues this penetration by sinuous economic acquisition, and by gaining surreptitious control of the sources of credit. She pursues it by conse- crating scientific initiative and chemical inven- tion to a despicable espionage. She pursues it through the inner direction of religious and fraternal societies, and through sottish betray- als of hospitality. She pursues it by sending abroad her teachers, her doctors, her clerks, her domestic servants, each of them a spy or a missionary of Germanism. She pursues it by having her bribed servants in all the world's postal services; by having her diplomatic courtesans in the world's political centres. She pursues it by an almost universal black- mail: there is scarcely an important household in France or England, scarcely a governmen- tal department or agency, of whose secrets the GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 11 Germans are unaware. The evil eyes of Ger- many run to and fro through all the earth, and nothing escapes her pernicious and par- alyzing observation and invasion. Not for one moment, neither in victory nor in defeat, does she relax her determination to impart the German way and will, the German state of mind, to every living people. Ill WE are at war, we of the Allies, with more than a military empire: we are at war, as Saint Paul would say, with the principalities of darkness, with the evil powers of the air: we are at war with a diabolic re- ligion. Make no mistake about it: Germanism is as certainly and distinctly a religion as primitive Buddhism, apostolic Christianity, or early Mohammedanism was a religion — but a re- ligion as black as these were white. Essential evil has been taken by the German national soul to be its good, to be its god. The jungle- inheritance which man has so long and yet un- successfully sought to transmute or discard, the persisting primeval mind that oppresses and rots the nations — it is these that Germany prays as well as fights to preserve, and the 12 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 13 marauding might that issues from these is her chosen summum bonum. Germanism is the worship and practice of material might as the Supreme Power, the re- gard for material efficiency as the Supreme Good. This is the only faith which the Ger- man tribes have ever consistently held, ever truly concentrated upon. It is the core of their creeds, the centre and circumference of their philosophies. Their mysticisms, in the last analysis, are the hallowings of sheer power — a pillar of cloud about materialist altars. Even Luther's appeal and stay were Jehovis- tic might. So assertive and formative this faith has been, especially since the time of Bis- marck and Marx, that the German collectiv- ity has created an actual psychic entity, a sort of national super-mind, that, enthroned and dominant, answers to all the purposes of a fearful and effectual deity. Yes, the Germans have literally made for themselves a god after their own image, and have delivered themselves bound into Ms 14 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE hands. They are so mastered and maddened, so blinded and besotted, by the monstrous thing they have made, they have so passed into the service of this world-abomination, that it may be there is left to them no power whereby they may deliver themselves. IV npHE winter will decide; for it offers Ger- ^ many the chance to deliver herself from the god she has created; and if she does not now see and seize the chance, then her deliv- erance must come from without. She must not count upon her present mili- tary advantage. Not because of that advan- tage will the Allies lay down their arms; nor will America sheathe the sword she has drawn — not if perchance all Europe be beneath the German dominion for a time. The advantage which Germany's military ascendency now gives her is this: — belikely her last opportunity to redeem herself in the eyes of the world, and to avert her own ulti- mate destruction. She can now, without de- feat or humiliation to herself, propose terms of peace that shall make way for the society 15 16 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE of nations, thus revealing whether or no there be a moral remnant among her leaders, a sav- ing repentance amongst her tribes. She can say to the world that the war has lasted long; that millions are dead, and the battles have brought no decision; and that now civilization is on the brink of the precipice. She can fur- thermore say that, in view of the price that has already been paid, and in order to avert the further crucifixion of humanity, she will her- self propose precise and persuasive terms of peace. Let her proclaim the complete and un- conditional restoration of Belgium and the oc- cupied portions of France. Let her return Alsace-Lorraine to France, and the possession of every part of Poland and of Russia. Let her request that Austria take a like attitude towards the Serbs and the Italians. Let her propose, in fine, the instant and honest re- making of the map of Europe according to the respective wishes of the European peoples, and the submission of all international ques- tions to the conference for peace, or to the GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 17 tribunal which the resultant society of nations may erect. Were Germany wise and able now to take this great initiative, to make the supreme beau geste, she would do for herself in a day what the battles of a hundred years could not accomplish. She would change her present position of a hated outlaw among the nations to one of fraternity and healing help- fulness. And if the heau geste is beyond her mind or imagination, if she is altogether incapable of accepting the divine chance, it is not prob- able she will ever again be consulted as to the terms of the peace that shall finally be made. If she fails to enter the door now open, it will not open again: it will close down upon her and her present political existence forever. She will not again be permitted to discuss or to choose: she can thenceforth have only such terms as shall be imposed upon her by the hu- manity that has suffered such immeasurable debasement and misery at her hands. She will be placed in such bonds, or be so divided, as 18 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE to make it impossible that she ever again have power to inflict what she has inflicted upon the world these last four years — indeed, these last forty years — yea, these twenty centuries and more. Whether the decision comes in two years or twenty, and even if she yet have Eu- rope awhile beneath her feet, the sword which America has drawn will not be sheathed until Germanism is destroyed from the face of the earth. y EUROPE is only beginning to understand America, and that very dimly. Permit me, as a middle-west American, to venture upon an interpretation. We Americans are still essentially a pioneer race. Our composite population is made up of peoples who mostly left Europe for some sort of freedom, religious, political, economic. We are not yet far removed from our pioneer past. The ancestral impulse is still ours. However contradictory and unrealizable may have been some of our ideals and efforts, we have not yet given over our original quest of The Golden Society. We are still political and religious pioneers. Our fabulous indus- trial development has not submerged The Great Hope which set the feet of our fathers 19 20 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE upon the coasts and amidst the forests and the prairies of the new world. We are also the most sentimental, the most idealistic, of the nations; and this despite our high finance, our industrial despotisms, our po- litical corruptions. Even our money-making has been of the nature of a sport, and has had in it a certain idealistic element. Those of us who have been the severest critics of American capitalism have yet recognized that it did not represent essential Americanism. Mere wealth has not been an end in itself with the American money-maker : we have not made money for its own sake. Our pursuit of wealth has always been a game to be played, a rivalry to be entered into, with some sort of ideal for its goal. And once he is stirred and seized by some strong universal responsibility, the American pursuit of the gold that perish- eth can easily be converted into the pursuit of the gold that is hid in the heart of God, and that must therein be gathered for immediate mortal uses. The best evidence of this is the GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 21 fact that we have entered upon this stupen- dous war, not knowing to what ends it may compel us, yet knowing it to be in square con- flict with our material interests, mayhap con- suming the wealth we have been a hundred years upheaping. Again, the substratum of our national life is unconsciously yet profoundly permeated by a curious blend of two great influences coming out of Geneva. Our primal national spirit is a mingling of Calvin and Rousseau. Rous- seau is the spuntual author of the Declaration of Independence which Jefferson penned; and those recurring religious movements which sweep over American life, so quickly and vari- ously affecting it, are Calvinistic in their gen- esis—even movements which take on theoreti- cal expressions contradictory to Calvinism, such as Christian Science, or the earlier churches that had the Wesleys for their found- ers. The Genevan blend is also in our teach- ers and leaders: you may find both Calvin and Rousseau in the souls of Abraham Lincoln and 22 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE Woodrow Wilson. In one fashion or an- other, articulate or inarticulate, the idea of the visible kingdom of God on earth, coexistent with and including the natural right of each individual to his own free life and develop- ment, has always been potential in American expectation and purpose. The theocratic and democratic principles, inextricably bound up with each other, are always somewhere in the American midst, even in the deepest shadows of our financial and political corruption. And behind this politico-theological inherit- ance, and deeper than all else, is an inerad- icable suspicion that the Sermon on the Mount is practicable; that Christ is the actual Lord of the earth. Incredible as it seems, and how- ever unintelligent and unorganized, this belief in Christ is no less the living foundation of American society. And our Gargantuan for- tunes, our fabulous industrial development, the wealth we have heaped up beyond all count- ing, — these have never been able to abolish or overbear a persistent though reticent faith that GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 23 the practice of Christ would yet prevail in our politics and wealth-making, and prove itself the solution of our mortal problems. This faith has been rarely confessed; and it has al- ways floundered in the face of social facts and forces. But it was always there, concealed in even our boisterous commercialism, and it only needed a supreme crisis to first precipitate it, and then to have it effectuate itself in a renas- cence of apostolic Christian purpose. It is this that Europe does not understand, neither Germany nor the Allies. If Germany understood, she would seek an unconditional peace to-morrow. If the Allies fully under- stood, there would be no question of a nego- tiated peace. It is incredible that, for the first time in the earth's annals, a great and powerful people has gone to war for humanity, for an abstract ideal, and against its own material interests. But, unbelievable as it is, it is true: America has gone to war for the purpose of cleaning up the world, and of ridding it of war and Germanism forever. VI GERMANY has deceived herself as to the quality of our common American pacifism. The reluctance of America to en- ter the war, or to believe that it could long con- tinue, was interpreted as indicative of a non- militant national soul. It is true that, for a long time, the encircling catastrophe did seem to us impossible. We felt that it must be some vast and horrible delirium, some devil's dream, from which we should awaken. It was against a half -century of American expectation. We had come to really believe that, in spite of our political and industrial sins, in spite of the world's materialism, we were approaching the threshold of international arbitration and fed- eration, opening into an ultimate good- will be- tween nations and societies and individuals. It took us two years to get it into our heads 24 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 25 that such a thing as the present world-war could actually be, or that the deeds which the German soldiers did were real. Slowly, in- deed, did the thing become credible; slowly did its meaning penetrate the American mind. But when we did perceive the catastrophe and the crisis it had precipitated, when we be- gan to lay hold of the meaning of it all, we were then moved by a sense of responsibility that was new and strange in the conscience and the conduct of nations. There grew within us a quiet but no less relentless resolution to hunt out and destroy the political system con- secrated to the preparations and mobilizations of the hell which the Germans had loosed upon the earth. We determined to make it impos- sible that the like of this should ever again happen to mankind. We began to feel, very soon, that unto us was amazingly given the di- vine chance of closing up the old world and its political methods; and that it furthermore rested with us to lay living foundations for a world wherein should be none but democratic 26 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE and cooperative peoples. We began to see in the pan- German idea and assault the con- centration and citadel of all the wrong forces of history, thus-gathered for their final strug- gle with the forces that make for the free and federate humanity. Now if Europe had looked deeply enough, or the German diplomats who had been in America had had any eyes of understanding, it would have been seen that American non- militarism is not non-militantism. We had ceased to be a military people, it is true We had become pacifist in the sense that we be- lieved the military method of settling disputes belonged to an unreturning and barbarous past. We had come to look upon war as an- achronistic, as having no place in a decent or advancing civilization. But because we were in this sense non-militarist, it was a fatal mis- take, on the part of Germany, not to discern that we Americans are the most militant of the nations. But such we were, — such we are, — as our GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 27 present procedure proves. We had merely transferred our militancy from the savagery of war to spiritual and social inquiry and adven- ture. American youths were preparing to make war on the unknown ; to wring from na- ture her secrets ; to find out the truth about the kingdom of heaven; to make the world a free and decent habitation, an equal invocation and opportunity, a place of brave and abundant and beauteous life, for all the sons and daugh- ters of men. It was Germany that blindly summoned this American militancy to action: she gave the fundamental American motive a grim but glo- rious opportunity. In playing for herself the devil's game, she has unknowingly called into the arena a nation that will now play one of God's great games, and play it consciously and constantly till it is wouo And the provi- dential nature of our summons and response is well-attested by a leadership that appears but rarely amidst the centuries, and then in times of great crisis. I refer, of course, to 28 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE President Woodrow Wilson, whose deepening faith and unshakable resolution we follow. America now sees here in central Europe, coming out of the German lands, an ancient spiritual monstrosity, a surviving primeval enormity, ever and anon breaking forth, when- ever it reckons its might sufficient, to steal or destroy the fruits of man's efforts toward a spiritual civilization — toward a society that shall be entirely civil and really free. For two thousand years, out of these German forests and fogs, Europe's destroyers have come. How many times has not Italy been laid waste by the Germans and been brought under their despotism? What European nation, large or small, has not had to fight for its life against the Germans or their dynasts? What effort toward upward change, including her own Protestant Reformation, has not been visited with Germany's sword and savagery? Except for the brief time when Napoleon drove the beast to its lair, the German terror has been always upon Europe. GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 29^ And now America has determined, not merely to drive this terror to its lair, but to destroy it utterly. America is convinced that there can be no society of nations, that the peace of good-will can never prevail, that there can be no continually-ascending social evolution, until this evil thing is felled and fin- ished. America sees that Germanism, how- ever difficult it may be to define, is the enemy of mankind ; the enemy of a common spiritual promise; the enemy of international morality; the enemy of social fraternity. Fraternity can have no chance, neither democracy nor freedom, nor the whole thing that Christ meant, until this reeking dragon of German- ism is slain. And we Americans are resolved, God helping us, not to sheathe the sword until we slay it. YeSj Germanism has to he brought to an end; the thing has to be accomplished; Amer- ica has gone forth for this accomplishment, Germanism and Americanism cannot stay to- gether in the same world: be it to-day or a him- 30 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE dred years hence, one or the other must go. The iron of God has gone deeply into the American soul, and in the strength thereof has America gone forth, and gone forth never to retreat. With the thing that Germany now is and means we shall not negotiate, we shall not compromise. Either she utterly and at once repents, becoming hence the complete oppo- site of what she now is, or America will march forth for Germany's military and imperial de- struction. And we intend not only to destroy German- ism, nor only to make the world safe for de- mocracy: we intend to make way for every- thing that makes hopeful the inner struggle of mankind upward. You have only to look into the faces of the splendid young thousands now gathering in France, — divinely awful with a youth the like of which this world has never before beheld, — whole regiments made up of men from our higher schools and universities, — ^men who are not herded and docile human animals but resolved and radiant individuals. GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 31 — you have but to look in the faces of these, and you may read therein the soul of an Amer- ican nation become conscious of its world-mis- sion, aflame with righteous judgment, and with a creative purpose that sources in Christ. Germany must now understand, even our Allies need yet to understand, that the more deeply we are involved in the war, the more de- voted thereto shall we become, the more re- lentless though resplendent will be our resolu- tion. Even if Germany should yet win victo- ries that seem complete for a time; even if she fulfil her boast of defeating France and Eng- land before we can fight beside them in suffi- cient force; — even so, America will never make peace with a victorious Germany. Europe must understand that we are capa- ble of becoming a nation of high fanatics. Every day the war continues makes it more and more to the American mind a religious war, a holy war. We are entering upon a veritable crusade, with a sword consecrated not only on the altars of the world's revolu- 32 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE tions, but upon the very altar of Christ's prom- ise of the kingdom of heaven. And ours will not be such as the crusade once derided by Ruskin, — "a crusade to rescue the tomb of a dead god," — ^but a crusade to make way for the coming of the living Christ into the total life of humanity. If you listen deeply enough, you may hear in the tramp of these millioned American youths the mystic march of the armies of Christ, fore-pictured by St. John in the Apocalypse. And if you watch closely the development of the American soul, as it ascends through these youthful hosts, you will find that in some rude yet glowing way these count the death they may or must die as the greatest opportunity that life could have given them; and they account it so because they are instinct with the idea that they are not only cleaning up the present evil world, but are also filling the whole human future with opportunity and promise such as man- kind has never before possessed. VII AMERICA and Germany stand over against each other as respective cham- pions of two opposing conceptions of man, two irreconcilable reasons for being. German history and evolution proceed upon the idea of the state as the supreme end of historic man, the final earthly expression of the will of God, and therefore super-moral and above law. In this conception, man is but an efficient instrument at best, and a serv- ile creature always, owned by the state and ex- isting for its expansion and dominion: as an individual, having a dignity and destiny of his own, he does not exist. Indeed, not in Ger- man thought, much less in German institu- tions, does either individuality or its candid recognition have place. The German state is the negation of individuality: it exists and ex- 33 34 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE pands, it conquers and compels, by virtue of its conscription of the individual's mental and moral being. Whether it be her evil penetration of other nations, or her close control of her own tribes and states, it is in this conscription of the soul that German power consists — a conscription subjecting the citizen to an automatism that is the very perfection of slavery. It is a slavery, too, that is all the more stultifying and besot- ting because of its concealment in an impos- ing precision and parade of organization. The German does not understand, the international apostles of German efficiency do not see, and least of all is it discerned by that masquerade of Germanism which terms itself Marxian and socialist, that the authoritarian order which they admire is built upon the soul's ordained but disguised degradation. In contradistinction to Germanism, Amer- ican ideals and institutions have their birth and being in a sincere faith in democracy, and are, despite betrayed hopes and baffling blunders, GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 35 a stupendous attempt at democratic realiza- tion. To this democracy, and in the debates and events which have determined America's evolution as a nation, the right of each man to completely be, the affirmation of his worth in and to himself, is fundamental; and equally fundamental is the responsibility of political and social institutions for furnishing him the freedom and opportunity that make complete being possible. It is what he is in himself, it is the fullness and effectiveness of his individ- uality, that constitutes his political and social value; and society or the state have value to him according to the measure and the means these provide for the realization of his selfhood in the joyous service of his fellows. States and governments exist, according to Amer- ican or democratic theory, for no other purpose than the making of man, and are judged ac- cording to their success or failure in the ful- filment of this purpose. It was in this pur- pose the American Revolution was conceived, as were also the French and English Revolu- S6 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE tions; and it is in the fulfilment of this pur- pose that the American people have gone, however blindly and unworthily betimes, upon their political way. VIII NOR is the American or democratic con- ception of man other than the expres- sion, in political terms, of the idea of Christ. The early Christian idea, that which themed all that Christ and his apostles said and did, consisted in the revelation and assertion of the universal worth of the single soul — of society's responsibility to and for it, of its responsibil- ity to and for society. According to this idea, it is for the fulness of the individual, in ac- cordant association with other individuals, that the universe unfolds. It is with the complete creation of men in his own image that the God of Christ occupies himself. And the stars in their courses, the temples and their religions, the states and their governments, the fruits of the fields and the researches of the intellect, 37 38 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE have no other reason for being than the evoca- tion of each man's divine identity. Christ conceived of humanity as one living and eternal organism — an organism which cannot be made perfect except through the per- fecting of each of its members. Not until the downmost man is redeemed unto fulness of being, not until the last man has achieved a will that is one with the divine will, — not till then can the human totality become harmonious and unwasting and happy: and until then the human collectivity, the whole visible and invis- ible communion of man, is deranged and dis- cordant and imperilled. The rights and the responsibilities of the individual, therefore, and the orchestration and upward constancy of the collectivity, — these constitute one and the self-same problem — a problem whose solu- tion is identical with the truth and the tri- umph of the Christ. It is precisely the truth that is in Christ, it is his doctrine of man and the triumph thereof, that are predicated by the mobiliza- GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 39 tion of Americanism against Germanism. It is his profounder coming that is being pre- pared, if we will have it so, by the American crusade for a democratic and federate world. The Great War is our summons and opportu- nity to invoke his universal and culminative appearingo Whether or no we shall soon see him as he is, whether or no we shall behold him as the very centre and uniting law of our hu- manity, depends upon how we conduct the war to its conclusion. If we discern not or deny the day of our visitation; if we dare not risk the heroic individual and institutional repent- ance which the light of him relentlessly re- quires; if we seek coward cover in the dark- ness of compromise, essaying peace where there is no peace; — if so the uplifted Son of Man be by us again cast down, then it must be left to a nobler generation to prepare his completer and completing presence in the world. IX BETWEEN the German conception of man as a creature of the herd, as a me- chanical and disciplined human tool of the state, and the American and apostolic concep- tion of man as a free son of God, there can be neither peace nor truce nor parley. Laden with predestinative consequences to all men and every nation, constituting the world's most definitive crisis, the conflict between these two life-conceptions is upon us. We can- not postpone or escape it: the issue will have to be fought out: one or the other conception must possess the world: if not to-day, then to- morrow the decision must be reached. And whatever it be, proceeding as it does from a struggle for the possession of our whole plane- tary life, it will determine, as I have said, our common direction and destiny for a long time 40 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 41 to come, and with an irrevocable finality. We shall be choosing between darkest human night and a new human day — between profound spiritual reaction and vast spiritual expansion — between the soul's long repression and its quick enlargement and ascension. Essentially and practically, the war which the German Empire is now carrying on is nothing else than a war against the human soul — against the right of the soul to self-deter- mination and self -ownership, to its own voli- tion, eocperience and development. The brag and the might of the German arms, the glam- our and the cheat of German material effi- ciency, the physical ease and relief from re- sponsibility which the German state and its systems provide, — these constitute the Great Seducer, the Great Destroyer, the Devouring Dragon of the Apocalypse; these are the su- preme assault of the powers of darkness upon the soul and upon society — ^upon the forces that would identify our human nature with the nature of God. 42 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE Americanism, on the other hand, so far as its place and purpose in this war are con- cerned, is identical with essential Christianism — with the soul's round redemption and as- cendency. The idea which Christ first pro- jected among men — the idea of a human soci- ety so inclusive and considerate and consecra- tive that it can only be described as the king- dom of heaven — this idea is, after all, the perennial charter of our western world. And our American youths, no matter what their im- mediate mind about the matter, have gone forth as the actual soldiers of this divine idea. The sword they have drawn against German- ism — against Germanism with its evil fore- sight, against Germanism with its unimagin- able Satanic craft, against Germanism with its long-developed purpose to subdue the earth and conscript the soul — the sword which America has thus drawn is none other than the sword of the Son of God. The war may last long, and terrors yet in- conceivable come upon us and increase — may GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE 43 last till cherished institutions prove futile and fall away; may last until deep night enclose all peoples for awhile. But if Satan be let loose for a season, it is that we may discern and destroy him, so that his authority be upon states and societies no more. It is true that it is not given to us to know the times and the modes of his ending, nor through what trib- ulations we may pass ere we reach it. But this we may know and need not doubt, — if we are able to receive it, — that the kingdoms of this world are on the way to become the king- dom of our God and his Christ ; and that this, and nothing less than this, is the meaning of these terrible but marvellous days — a mean- ing, too, depending not upon the teachers for its revelation and report, but soon by the peo- ples to be perceived and proclaimed. The air is even now astir with news; al- ready, some strange new faith is unfolding. There is an unprecedented sense of Christ among us; and commanding dreams of his commonwealth are abroad, compelling many 44 GERMANISM AND THE AMERICAN CRUSADE secret but splendid consecrations. There are also those who, watching amidst the slaughter and the desperate shadows, are glimpsing his sudden peace, waiting there, with all its sur- passing ardency and strength, to spring upon the shattered nations. They see him gather- ing these, healed and resurgent, into one ful- filling fellowship, one ineffable freedom, and a common and eternal progress in the bosom of God. And it is by this faith, — it is by this faith, — it is upon the altar of some such stu- pendous expectation of Christ, — that not a few American fathers and mothers are offer- ing up their willing and beloved sons. 119 2 • • * \y |: %^^* :»': \/ -M' V' # Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide %*"'*' v^ ♦ • •- "^c- * • ' * o"^ PreservationTechnoldgies >^. ,^ ..^J\^K^A.'o *^ /jj* ^* A WORLD LEADER IM PAPER PRESEBVATION •$• A*' jCVVSIT/Ti o vP >-*D 111 Thomson Park Drive VS. ** jC^C vg^^^ , ^A *5 *> Cranberry Township. 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