Let us, moreover, if we would duly appreciate the lesson to be derived from such a spectacle, bear in mind the character and capacities of the nation by which it is exhibited. We should bear in mind that Germany is probably the most highly educated country in Europe; its science, its literature, its arts, its industry have been among the finest that the world has seen. In religion it gave Europe the Reformation; and the great Protestant nations of the world, alike in Europe and America, recognize the immense spiritual debt they have owed to it in the past. Our own theological literature, during the last century, has acknowledged an immense debt to it, and German scholars have, in our own time, been in the front rank of the learning of the world. It is a country which was proud of its culture, and, in such matters as I have mentioned, with full justice. No thoughtful man can treat the Germans, as a nation, as inferior to any other in Europe, in all the externals of such culture. All the achievements of past history, all the acquisitions of Christian civilisation, lay open before them, as much as before ourselves, and they are bound to us by intimate ties of blood and of common interests. It is a nation, in short, with every equipment which human intellect, and art, and Nature can bestow; and yet, notwithstanding all this, the nation, as a whole, has formed a judgment so false and inhuman, on the very elements of moral duty, that we are forced to recognize that in fighting it we are fighting not merely a political foe, but a moral outlaw from Christian civilisation.