Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/12

 uncomfortable contrast to the care and elegance of his Latin and his French, he never shrank from using his native tongue unless occasion demanded more cosmopolitan speech. So far as I know, his communications to the Emperor were all in German; nor had he for gotten Luther s principle of plain speech for plain folk.

You may think that I am losing my way before I have reached the threshold which I have invited you to cross with me, and I will therefore say nothing of Leibniz s labours for the communication of the results of research as well as for its prosecution, nor ask you to consider his claims to the title of the originator of the modern encyclopaedia. But there is a different instance of his constructive efforts as a man of action which I cannot pass by not only because it completely harmonises with his endeavours as a politician, but because at times it intimately associates itself with, and almost forms part of them. For there can be no doubt whatever that the religious question continued to be a vital element in European politics, and in those of the Empire in particular, long after the conflicts which culminated in the Thirty Years War had nominally come to an end.

The efforts, then, of Leibniz for Religious Reunion, i.e., for a formal closing of the great schism of the West by means of a reconciliation between Rome and the Protestant Churches, were among those of his labours which were doomed to disappointment whether, like certain others on which we shall have to touch, to absolute failure, is more than those of us can pronounce who lack the gift of prophecy. How unwearying those labours were in the present instance is known to us not only from the arguments carried on by him alike with the protagonists in a discussion which lasted over the better part of a human generation, from the Eagle of Meaux downwards, and with the parliament of lesser participants—ecclesiastics and doctors and more or less enthusiastic women. We also know it from at least two long correspondences of which one is familiar to