Germany may still retain a monopoly of toys; Germany may still continue to supply Princes to the vacant thrones of Europe; but it is eminently probable that God Almighty will cease to be made in the Vaterland.
No one who has not been brought up in a Scottish Presbyterian University atmosphere realizes the mystical prestige hitherto enjoyed by German theology. The education of a Scottish divine was thought incomplete, a graduate in divinity, however brilliant and devout, could not get an important charge, if he had not received the hallmark and consecration of a German theological faculty. And what was true of German Universities was equally true of German theological books. Publishers like Messrs. Clark, of Edinburgh, and Messrs. Williams and Norgate, of London, made considerable fortunes merely from their translations of German works of divinity.
The prejudice in favour of German Universities and against French Universities goes back to the early days of the Reformation. Already in “Hamlet” we find the serious young man going to Wittenberg and the frivolous young man going to Paris in quest of worldly amusement. That pro-German and anti-French prejudice has continued until our own day. In vain have I for twenty years attempted in the Universities of Scotland to send our graduates to French Universities. In vain did I contend that one single year spent in the Sorbonne provided greater intellectual stimulus than a whole decade spent in a German University. The old Puritan feeling against France proved too strong. Until the year 1914 the stream of our students continued to be directed to Göttingen and Heidelberg, to Bonn and Berlin. Even in our distant colonies, even in Toronto, I found that the majority of teachers were “made in Germany,” whilst of American Universities it is hardly too much to say that many of them had actually become German institutions.
The prejudice which sent Scottish and English ministers of the Gospel to complete their preparation in Germany was all the more extraordinary because Positive Christianity had almost vanished from the theological faculties of Protestant Germany. Even as Holy Russia has remained on the whole the most Christian nation in Europe, Protestant Prussia was certainly the least Christian. It was aptly said by Huxley of the philosophy of Comte, that Comtism was Catholicism minus Christianity. We might say in the same way of German theology, that it was philosophy and metaphysics and philology minus Christianity. Seventy-five years ago David Frederick Strauss, who would be forgotten but for the pamphlet of Nietzsche, wrote a ponderous treatise of a thousand pages, translated by George Eliot, to prove that Christ was a myth. At the end of his life he strenuously attempted in his “Old and New Faith” to find a substitute for Christian theology. German Protestantism travelled the road he indicated. The German people have ceased to believe in Christianity; but they have come to believe in the self-styled Anti-Christ Nietzsche. They have ceased to believe in God; but they still believe in His self-appointed vicegerent, the Kaiser. They have ceased to believe in Providence; but they still believe in a Providential German nation. They have ceased to believe in the Holy Trinity; but they believe all the more fanatically in the New Trinity of the Superman, the Super-race and the Super-State. And it is this new fanatical belief which has brought about the war of the nations.