If I were asked to sum up the achievements of Lutheranism, I would say that it has accomplished two things equally fatal to Germany and Europe. On the one hand it has broken up the spiritual unity of Medieval Christendom and the political unity of the Holy German Empire into two thousand four hundred petty principalities. It has set up a tribal religion and the pagan idolatry of the State; and, on the other hand, it has broken up the human soul into two water-tight compartments. Or to express the Lutheran achievement in terms of freedom and despotism, it has, in the first place, killed political liberty by surrendering all ecclesiastical power to the Prince, or to the State incarnated in the Prince. It has brought about the fusion and confusion of spiritual and temporal powers. It has decreed that the religion of the ruler shall determine the religion of the subject. _Cujus regio illius religio._ From the beginning his own ecclesiastical policy compelled Luther to sanction the bigamy of the Landgrave Philip of Hesse. In the most violent of his tracts he denounced a miserable German peasantry, and he called upon the nobility to massacre those peasants who had only too faithfully obeyed the provocations of the reformer. And, in the second place, Lutheranism has killed spiritual liberty by creating an inner world of emotions and of dreams and an outer world of social and political activities without any relation to the inner world. It has divorced speculation and action, theory and practice. The German is like the symbolical eagle of the Habsburg. He has two heads, and both look in an opposite direction. I would say that the poison of Lutheranism has been acting like that mysterious Indian poison called “curare,” which I used to inject in my distant student days when I had to dissect frogs in the Zoological Laboratory at Liége. The “curare” does not kill the nerves, for the frog still suffers under the dissecting knife. Nor does it kill the muscles, for the muscles still react if you stimulate them. But the poison cuts the connection between the nerves and the muscles. The nerves can no more transmit their orders to the muscles. Even so Lutheranism has not killed the thinking power of the German people. On the contrary, it has given it a morbid stimulus, as speculation is no more hampered by reality. Nor has it paralyzed their external activities, but it has prevented any connection between the two. It has prevented the thinking from influencing the acting. It justifies the recent damning statement of Prince von Bülow, who ought to be a competent judge, that the Germans have remained an essentially unpolitical people.