208 PKOF. F. F. KOGET^ ON FREDEKIC GODET^ SWISS DIVINE, 



magnificent public part which fell to the Hohenzollerns to play 

 in the history of Europe, and whicli gave its characteristic to 

 the nineteenth century — a part in which their earnestness and 

 quietness fitted in so efficiently and one of the secret main- 

 springs of which appears so plainly in the correspondence of 

 the Crown Prince with his former tutor. 



Should we seek an illustration from a parallel class of 

 grandeur, by comparing the Bonapartes with the Hohenzollerns, 

 would it for a single instant be tenable that Napoleon the 

 First might have had Frederic Godet for a friend ? No. 



We venture to say that this impossibility throws a great 

 deal of light upon the opposite fortunes of those families which 

 v^ere pitted against each other in a way which seemed to 

 confer all the chances upon the Bonapartes, first after Jena, and 

 then from 1850 up to Sedan, in 1870. 



Godet could be a friend to rulers who had a conscience, both 

 public and private. He could not have found in either 

 Napoleon this fundamental requirement for the just and equal 

 friendship of a Protestant clergyman with a ruler of men. 

 There is no small lesson in this apparently insignificant lifelong 

 friendship of a plain Protestant clergyman with the Prussian 

 House. To my mind, therein is contained the explanation of 

 the rise of Germany above France. The plain clergyman had 

 a conscience, a commanding sense of the gravity of sin. He 

 could associate with the Eoyal House in which a like conscience 

 and sense were alive. 



While he trod busily along his own little path of life, the 

 Hohenzollerns kept clear of the dreadful sin of pride, which 

 ruined Napoleon the First, and of conceit, which ended 

 Napoleon the Third. The quietly hourgeois — or rather humbly 

 Christian- — conscience of the Hohenzollerns proved in their 

 hands an absolutely reliable Empire-building instrument. The 

 downfall of the Bonapartes before the Hohenzollerns showed 

 earthly power gathering round those to whom to acknowledge 

 the law of conscience was a duty to God. 



By none was the allegiance of conscience to Christianity more 

 clearly ex]:)ressed in State affairs than by the Prince whom the 

 Germans styled Friedrich der Giitige and the English Frederick 

 the Noble. His tragic end, before he could actually reign, 

 found him full of Christian resignation at a moment when he 

 might have been most bitterly resentful. In the story of 

 Godot's life is refiected, as in a side-mirror, the history of that 

 soul, making this plain that the nearest support it had in this 

 world, it found in the firm, clear spirit of the Neuchatel 



