In the year 800 A. D. the Catholic Church, which took over the Roman supremacy to translate it into a spiritual empire, accepted a German Emperor, Charlemagne, as her man-at-arms. One hundred and fifty years later she accepted still another, Otto I. This partnership was called the Holy Roman Empire. It has been noted, but is still misunderstood, that the difference between the Catholic Church before and after the Reformation was very marked. The Catholic Church claimed to be not only a system of belief but a system of government. Infallibility was to include secular as well as religious matters, and the church strove to rule as a secular emperor and as a spiritual tyrant. To-day Roman Catholicism is a sect, one among many; Roman Catholics themselves would be the last to consent to any temporal universal power. The Protestants, too, were at first inclined to the methods of Rome. Luther teaches intolerance, and Calvin burns a heretic and writes in favor of the doctrine: Jure gladii coercendos esse hereticos. The real reformation only came when we had reformed the reformers, but it was that spiritual and political legacy from Rome that the Teuton world, including ourselves, fought to nullify. There was no successful revolt against this curious spiritual Caesarism until the son of a Saxon miner named Luther married out of monkdom, burnt the Pope's commands on a bonfire, and plunged all Europe first into a peasants' war, followed by a dividing of Europe between a Protestant union and a Catholic league, and then a thirty years' war, which destroyed two thirds of the population of what is now Germany. After three hundred years of disunion and hatreds, Prussia united their country by a cement of blood and iron, and in the last forty years has made out of her the most powerful nation on the continent of Europe. It is only very lately that any of us have realized what has happened. So little attention has been paid to the matter that there is no sufficient and worthy history of Germany in English. More than we realize, Germany is a new factor in politics, a new rival in commerce, a new knight in the tournament lists. This accounts, in no small degree, for the uneasiness Germany causes in the world. Forty years ago Germany was known to a few students as having supplied us with music, mythology, and a certain amount of enchanting literature; scholarship along certain lines; and work in philosophy that a few in America and in England were studying. As a knight in shining armor, demanding a place at the council-board of nations, and ready to resent any passing over of her claims to recognition in the discussion and settlement of international politics, she is a newcomer.