If such an awful perversion of judgment is possible, have we not reason to tremble at the possibilities of human error? The horrors I have recalled are a disgrace to Germany; but let us not disguise from ourselves the lamentable fact that they are also a disgrace to human nature. To this, we must realize, human nature can come, in spite of literature, and science, and art, and the traditions of generations, and profound religious capacities. One cannot divide the Germans from all other human races, or even from ourselves, and say that they have a human nature of their own. It is our common human nature which, in this case, has succumbed to such a degraded judgment, and which has become false to the inherited principles of Christian civilization. What we ought to learn from so distressing a spectacle is the absolute need of some influence higher than any that mere human nature, when left to itself, can exert, if the moral judgment, the moral sense, the moral character of nations and races, and of ourselves among them, are to be kept true to the ideals towards which human nature, at its best, has always been striving, and which our Lord Jesus Christ has revealed as the eternal standard established by God. I am afraid there can be no doubt respecting one cause, at all events, of this terrible degradation. For the last generation or two, in consequence of the prevalence in Germany of a false philosophy and an extravagant criticism, the minds of the educated classes in that country have been imbued with a complete distrust of the Scriptures, and of the revelation of God in Christ; and, in consequence, they have abandoned all deference to the authority of God’s Word and the example and teaching of our Lord. I believe, indeed, that faith in God and God’s Word, and love of Christ, still subsist in much of their old intensity among the simpler classes of the German nation--among numbers to whom the name and the teaching of Luther are still a venerated influence. But they have ceased to mould the character and guide the thoughts of the educated classes, and the consequence is that human nature has broken loose from all control, and has abandoned itself to an unbridled lust of power and of earthly pleasure.