"But I am glad," concluded Hellar as he arose, "that I do not believe
Gutenberg's Bible either, for I should very much dislike to think of
meeting him in Paradise."
~7~
After taking leave of my companions I walked on alone, oblivious to the
gay throng, for I had many things on which to ponder. In these two men I
felt that I had found heroic figures. Their fund of knowledge, which
they prized so highly, seemed to me pitifully circumscribed and limited,
their revolutionary plans hopelessly vague and futile. But the
intellectual stature of a man is measured in terms of the average of his
race, and, thus viewed, Zimmern and Hellar were intellectual giants of
heroic proportions.
As I walked through a street of shops. I paused before the display
window of a bookstore of the level. Most of these books I had previously
discovered were lurid-titled tales of licentious love. But among them I
now saw a volume bearing the title "God's Anointed," and recalled that I
had seen it before and assumed it to be but another like its fellows.
Entering the store I secured a copy and, impatient to inspect my
purchase, I bent my steps to my favourite retreat in the nearby Hall of
Flowers. In a secluded niche near the misty fountain I began a hasty
perusal of this imperially inspired word of God who had anointed the
Hohenzollerns masters of the earth. Hellar's description had prepared me
for a preposterous and absurd work, but I had not anticipated anything
quite so audacious could be presented to a race of civilized men, much
less that they could have accepted it in good faith as the Germans
evidently did.
"God's Anointed," as Hellar had scoffingly inferred, not only proclaimed
the Germans as the chosen race, but also proclaimed an actual divinity
of the blood of the House of Hohenzollern. That William II did have some
such notions in his egomania I believe is recorded in authentic history.
But the way Eitel I had adapted that faith to the rather depressing
facts of the failure of world conquest would have been extremely comical
to me, had I not seen ample evidence of the colossal effect of such a
faith working in the credulous child-mind of a people so utterly devoid
of any saving sense of humour.
Not unfamiliar with the history of the temporal reign of the Popes of
the middle ages, I could readily comprehend the practical efficiency of
such a mixture of religious faith with the affairs of earth. For the God
of the German theology exacted no spiritual worship of his people, but
only a very temporal service to the deity's earthly incarnation in the
form of the House of Hohenzollern.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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