The French have a proverb that “to know everything is to forgive everything.” That seems too easy a solution. I would like to offer an amendment and change it as follows: “To know everything is to understand everything.” We can leave the business of pardoning to the good Lord who ages ago reserved that right to himself. Meanwhile we ourselves can humbly try to “understand” and that is more than enough for our limited human ability. And now let me return to the Reformation, which started me upon this slight detour. As far as I “understand” that movement, it was primarily a manifestation of a new spirit which had been born as a result of the economic and political development of the last three centuries and which came to be known as “nationalism” and which therefore was the sworn enemy of that foreign super-state into which all European countries had been forced during the course of the last five centuries. Without the common denominator of some such grievance, it would never have been possible to unite Germans and Finns and Danes and Swedes and Frenchmen and Englishmen and Norsemen into a single cohesive party, strong enough to batter down the walls of the prison in which they had been held for such a long time. If all these heterogeneous and mutually envious elements had not been temporarily bound together by one great ideal, far surpassing their own private grudges and aspirations, the Reformation could never have succeeded. It would have degenerated into a series of small local uprisings, easily suppressed by a regiment of mercenaries and half a dozen energetic inquisitors. The leaders would have suffered the fate of Huss. Their followers would have been killed as the little groups of Waldenses and Albigenses had been slaughtered before them. And the Papal Monarchy would have scored another easy triumph, followed by an era of Schrecklichkeit among those guilty of a “breach of discipline.” Even so, the great movement for reform only succeeded by the smallest of all possible margins. And as soon as the victory had been won and the menace which had threatened the existence of all the rebels had been removed, the Protestant camp was dissolved into an infinitesimal number of small hostile groups who tried on a greatly diminished scale to repeat all the errors of which their enemies had been guilty in the heyday of their power. A French abbé (whose name I have unfortunately forgotten, but a very wise fellow) once said that we must learn to love humanity in spite of itself.