120 PROF. D. S. MARGOLIOUTH, D.L1TT., ON THE INFLUENCE OF 



in his writings regularly speaks as a Christian and a Protestant ; 

 one of the recently translated essays is an appreciation of the 

 work of Luther. A sentence or two may be quoted, not in 

 order to ridicule what they contain, but rather to indicate the 

 historian's views. We have to thank the Re formation for enabling 

 the German to think both piously and independently, for permitting 

 not one of our great thinkers, however hold his flight, to fall into 

 the blaspliemous mockery of a Voltaire and for causing the mortal 

 sin of hypocrisy to he almost unknown amongst us. Herein lies 

 the greatness of Protestantism : it will not suffer a contradiction to 

 exist hetween thinking and willing, between religion and moral life. 

 According to this Nietzsche should not count among the great 

 thinkers of Germany, for in his blasphemous mockery he is 

 certainly not inferior to Voltaire. He expresses himself as follows 

 concerning Luther and the Eeformation : that Luther s reformation 

 succeeded in the Xortli is a sign that the Xorth was backward a* 

 compared with the South of Europe, and, indeed, no Christianiza- 

 tion of Europe woidd have taken plcwe had not the culture of the 

 old southern world been barbarized by am excessive mixture of 

 barbarous German blood, and so lost its preponderant civilization. 

 So far as he has any religious sympathy it is with paganism. 

 It would, however, shock the audience to quote much of what 

 this writer says on the subject of religious belief. One para- 

 graph may, perhaps, be translated : The most important of recent 

 events, that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian deity has 

 become incredible — has already begun to cast its shadow over 

 Europe. For the few at least whose eyes and the suspicion therein 

 are strong and subtle enough for this spectacle some sort of sun 

 seems to have gone clown, some old and prof ound conviction to have 

 been transformed into a doubt ; to them our old world must seem 

 daily more eveninglike, suspicious, strange and old. In the main, 

 however, we may say: the event itself is far too great, distant, 

 removed from the comprehension of many, for even the news thereoj 

 to be correctly described as having reached them : far less can it be 

 said that many already know the import of this event, or all that 

 must now collapse owing to that belief having been undermined ; as 

 having been built on that belief , supported thereby and grown there- 

 into — e.g., the ivhole system of European morals. Of this long series 

 and combination of breach, destruction, ruin, collapse, ivhich awaits 

 us, who can to-day guess enough to count as the teacher and 

 Jiarhi/igrr of this monstrous logic of terrors^ as the prophet of a 

 darkness and a solar eclipse the like of which has never yet taken 

 place on earth ? . . . In fact we philosophers and freethinkers at 

 this news that tlie old God is dead feel as though a new dawn 



