"Not that alone," continued the scholar. "What you know, and believe also, and much that occupies your heart, has been delivered to you through your nation from its own and foreign sources. Every word that you speak has been transmitted and remodelled through hundreds of generations, to receive thereby that sound and significance which you now so easily command. It was for this object that our ancestors came into the country from Asia, and that Arminius struggled with the Romans for the preservation of our language, that you might be able to give Gabriel an order which both could understand. It was for you the poets lived, who, in the youth of the Hellenic people, invented the powerful rhythm of the epic verse, which it gives me such pleasure to hear from your lips. Furthermore, that you may believe, as you do, it was necessary that three hundred years ago there should take place in your Fatherland a great and mighty struggle of opinion; and again, more than a thousand years earlier, a mighty conflict of the soul in a small people of Asia; and again, fifty generations earlier still, venerated commandments given under the tents of a wandering people. You have to thank a past which begins with the first life of man on earth for most that you have and are, and in this sense the whole human race has lived in order that you might be able to live." Ilse looked excitedly at her husband. "The thought is elevating," she exclaimed, "and is calculated to make man proud. But how does that agree with this same man being a nonentity, and crushed like a worm in the great events of history?"