The debates in the House of Lords, within recent weeks, on the future of Germany shows the acuteness of the difficulty that will face the Allies in victory. The divisions in France are problem enough, but the pacification of Germany is far more serious. The Peers evidently grasped the problem ; no one has yet come forward with a possible solution. The conundrum is as baffling a one as any statesman has had to answer. The Nazi Party have succeeded in corrupting a high percentage of a vast people. They have set up an effective machine which exploits the evil tendencies—to be found in every people—of proud nationalism and of the false values of materialism. This paganism subjects truth to action so that what benefits the one nation is true, what does not is false. Like the Communists, the Nazis have given themselves the liberty to tell lies and break promises as it suits their purpose, a fact which should cause us no surprise, since it consists with their principles. This has reduced all the good elements in German society to defenceless impotence. The new paganism has even found men and women who were ready to propagate its doctrines in Christian words : the ‘German Christians’ thought to unite a garbled version of Christ’s teaching with that of Hitler and Rosenberg. Worst of all, the machinery was constructed so as to deprive the youth of the nation of truth and saturate it with the inhuman worship of blood and race. Pius XI wrote in his famous encyclical on the Church in Germany : ‘Thus to have ushered in the betrayal of the eternal principles of an objective morality ... is a sin against the future of the people, whose bitter fruits the coming generations will taste.’

It is of profound significance that since the end of the last war Catholic thinkers in Germany should have devoted themselves almost exclusively to the preparation for the struggle for the Faith which is now raging. It is as though they had sensed the impending danger and were concentrating all their energies on the twofold task of arriving at a true appreciation of the present spiritual situation, and of providing the means to solve its problems in the spirit of Christ. This struggle for the Faith, for the very reason that it is fought on the spiritual plane, is by no means identical with the present war, which only becomes relevant as it serves to clarify the situation, and affects the spirits of men. The decisive events will take place in the depths of the human heart; it is here that the future of mankind will be decided. The crucial question is the same, which has at all times determined the fate of the individual as well as of nations : ‘What think ye of Christ?’

This question was asked in the days of the Roman Empire, when to acknowledge the Kingship of Christ meant torture and death. It was asked in ages when belief was easy, when the individual was not yet torn out of community with his fellows, and lived in a world which bore in every detail the stamp of God. It is characteristic of the present situation that the very conditions which enabled such a question to be heard and answered in the past, seem no longer to exist.

I was in 1937 that one of the Gestapo-men who were then questioning me asked whether the Protestant Church was not in full collaboration with the Catholic Church. When I denied this, he insisted that one of our ministers had made that statement at a certain meeting. As I had attended that meeting myself, I pointed out that he had only spoken about the unprecedented friendliness that existed between the Churches, but not about collaboration. ‘And what is the reason for these extraordinary good relations?’ I could not help asking. ‘It is that both Churches to-day have to defend the same thing, v'z. the world beyond.’

I remember another, very different experience. In the winter of 1928-29 I was the only non-Catholic to address a Catholic conference at Boppard, on the Rhine, one of the other speakers being Dr. Briining, shortly to be Chancellor of the Reich.

For two reasons the struggle of the Church of Christ against Nazism has been different from any other. In the first place the Church no longer suffers passively as during the times of persecution even down to that of Bolshevism, but has passed from the defensive to the attack. Secondly, the enemy in so far as he makes his appearance within the Protestant Church itself—the ‘German Christians’—does not represent a new heresy but the old rationalistic ones, though joined to the political power. Thus the Church in Germany is fighting neither against sects nor against the State, but against a combination of both, which we call the ‘heretical State.’

Towards the close of the nineteenth century Ernest Renan wrote: ‘I have studied Germany and believed I entered a temple. All I have found there is pure, elevated, moral, beautiful and moving. O my soul, it is a treasure indeed, it is the continuation of Jesus Christ. Their morality fills me with admiration, how sweet and how strong they are! I believe that Christ will come to us from there.’

What he meant by ‘Christ’ was: ‘A pure cult, a religion without priests and without exterior practices, resting entirely on the heart's feelings, on the imitation of God, on the Immediate relation of our conscience with the Heavenly Father . . . Jesus founded religion in humanity as Socrates philosophy . . . Jesus founded absolute religion, excluding nothing, determining nothing except the sentiment.’ That is one of the strong currents which Germany sent into the maelstrom of modern European civilisation. Kant, Hegel, Strauss, ‘Baur, Goethe were the sources.”

In 1936 Abbot Ildefons Herwegen spent four weeks in Italy. In an audience the late Pope said that he had himself been able to establish that liturgical life in Germany was on the increase, and that this was a strong support for Holy Church in these days of strife and suffering. And this is another current of which Maria-Laach is the source.

Europe is one. Its unity is not an opposition of races and nations overcome by commercial, diplomatic or cultural contacts.

The Industrial Revolution had progressed through the earlier decades of the nineteenth century before there arose any true appreciation either of the vastness of the economic changes that were in progress or the extent of the social evils that were in rapid growth. Agriculture continued to fall back before the viiles tentaculaires of Verhaeren’s vision and a huge new and debilitated population crowded into the sordid streets as fast as they sprang up. It is true that as early as 1839 the Comte de Montalembert, stirred in his Catholic conscience by rumours as to the conditions under which the factory workers lived, journeyed up to Lancashire to see for himself ‘these appalling towns ‘which filled him with a ‘triple horror,’ but this was the gesture of a singularly kind-hearted politician rather than an experiment in scientific investigation. The emergence on every side of vast fortunes was guarantee enough to the average citizen that great material progress was being made, while the political economists of the day unhesitatingly enunciated the principles on which such progress could be relied on for the future.

Unexpectedly enough, it was in Germany that a new appreciation on Christian lines was to present itself on a wide scale with social and religious results of the highest importance. It was in the Western parts of the Empire, and more especially in the Catholic Rhineland, that industrial development first showed itself on lines similar to those in England, and these were the districts that had been most severely affected by the principles of the French Revolution and by the disasters of the Napoleonic wars.

The history of the Swastika-Movement goes back to the early nineteenth century. At that time, when the first archaeological excavations were made in Germany the Swastika was found on many objects from Germanic tombs of the first Christian centuries, and so it came to be regarded as a Germanic symbol. The first to popularise the sign was a man named Jahn, who in 1806 founded the German gymnastic clubs, which politically had a strongly nationalistic tendency. Jahn subsequently came to be known as ‘The father of the gymnastic movement.’ His motto was : ‘Frisch, Fromm, Froehlich, Frei’—‘Brisk, Pious, Joyous, Free’; and he arranged the four ‘F’s’ of this device to form a badge in the shape of a Swastika.

Then, the seventies of the last century saw the rise of Anti-Semitism in Germany and the foundation of various Anti-Semitic parties, which in the years before the World War 1914-18 took an increasingly radical direction under the influence of the race theorists. The Swastika, which the Viennese author Guido List (1848-1919), in his bombastically written books, called ‘The holy symbol of the Aryans,’ became, some years before the World War 1914-18, thanks to his writings, the generally adopted badge of the Anti-Semites.

In order to understand later developments, it is necessary to study List’s writings, which prior to 1914 were widely current in ‘nationalist’ circles in Germany and Austria—although indeed they are completely forgotten to-day. Fundamentally, Guido List’s ideas are based on the vague and disputed writings of the Germanised Englishman, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, and his predecessors, such as the French count Joseph de Gobineau and the latter’s compatriot, De Lapouge. To these must be added the publications of the East Prussian archaeologist, Gustav Kossinna, and certain misinterpreted teachings of the famous German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche.