Page:Addresses to the German nation.djvu/122

 superstition. In the immigrant Teutons this religion found disciples who had no previous intellectual education to hinder its acceptance, but also no hereditary superstition favourable to it. Hence, it was presented to them as one of the things that formed part of the equipment of a Roman, which is what they wanted to become; but it had no special influence on their life. These Christian educators would obviously not let their new converts know any more than suited their purpose about the ancient culture of Rome or its language, the key to its culture; and here, too, we have a reason for the decay and death of the Latin language in their mouth. When later the untouched and genuine works of the old culture fell into the hands of these peoples, and when the impulse to think and understand for themselves was thereby stirred into action, then, partly because this impulse was new and fresh to them, and partly because they had no inherited terror of the gods to act as a counterpoise, the contradiction between blind faith and the strange things that in course of time had become its objects was bound to strike them far more sharply than it had struck the Romans themselves when Christianity first came to them. The perception of an utter contradiction in what one has hitherto faithfully believed excites laughter. Those who had solved the riddle laughed and mocked; and even the priests, who had also solved it, laughed with the rest; they could do so in safety, because only very few people had access to the classical culture which broke the spell. Here I refer especially to Italy, the chief seat of neo-Latin culture at that time, the other neo-Latin races being still very far behind Italy in every respect.

They laughed at the deception, because there was no earnestness in them to turn bitter. Their exclusive