other is that neither the old religion combined with the old learning, nor both with the new science, suffice to save a nation bent on self-destruction. The suicide of Germany, the outstanding fact of the war, followed an outburst of national megalomania. For she had religion--it may shock some of you to hear! I mean the people, not the writers or the thinkers, but the people for whom Luther lived and Huss died. Of the two devotional ceremonies which stand supreme in my memory, one was a service in the Dom, Berlin, in which "not the great nor well bespoke, but the mere uncounted folk" sang Luther's great hymn "_Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott._"[6] With the Humanities Germany never broke, and the proportion of students in her schools and universities who studied Greek and Latin has been higher than in any other country. You know better than I the innumerable classical studies of her scholars. In classical learning relating to science and medicine she simply had the field; for one scholar in other countries she had a dozen, and the monopoly of journals relating to the history of these subjects. And she had science, and led the world in the application of the products of the laboratory to the uses of every-day life--in commerce, in the arts, and in war. Withal, like Jeshurun, she waxed fat; and did ever such pride go before such destruction? What a tragedy that the successors of Virchow and Traube and Helmholtz and Billroth should have made her a byword among the nations! "Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds!" [4] 1778, p. 30. [5] "Why the Pythian Priestess," etc. (Plutarch's _Morals_, vol. III, p. 100, Goodwin's edition). [6] And the other, how different! The crowded Blue Mosque of Cairo, and the crowded streets with the thousands of kneeling Moslems awaiting the cry of the muezzin from the tower. II So much preliminary to the business before us, to meet changed conditions as practical men, with the reinforcement born of hope or with the strong resolution of despair.