Page:French Calvinism, German Lutheranism and the War.pdf/18

- 17 - Thus the nonjuring Catholic Priests challenged the tyranny of Robespierre. Thus in our own day the Catholic German bishops challenged the tyranny of Bismarck. Now this sort of political protest, this sort of Calvinistic protestantism or of catholic protestantism, this sort of political nonconformity has never happened in the Lutheran Churches. And that is why I am entitled to say that Lutheranism has made for political despotism. All religions have been found equally serviceable by the Hohenzollern. As Frederick II the Hohenstaufen Emperor would gather round him a court of Saracens in Sicily, so Frederick II the Hohenzollern King would gather round him a court of cosmopolitan atheists, whilst through a curious paradox he would welcome at the same time to his dominions the Jesuit Fathers expelled by the Roman Pope.

V.

I now come to my fifth proposition against the Lutheran Church. It has broken and destroyed the integrity of the German mind. What the policy of Lutheranism/