since the year 1750.  A literature and a science, born in the hearts of the nation, and deeply rooted in the moral teaching of Protestantism, had raised their minds far beyond the boundaries of practical life into the sunlit heights of intellectual liberty, and manifested the power and superiority of the German spirit.  “Thus the new poetry and science became for many decades the most effectual bond of union for this dismembered people, and decided the victory of Protestantism in German life.” [B]

[Footnote B:  Treitschke, “Deutsche Geschichte”, i., p. 88.]

Germany was raised to be once more “the home of heresy, since she developed the root-idea of the Reformation into the right of unrestricted and unprejudiced inquiry”. [C] Moral obligations, such as no nation had ever yet made the standard of conduct, were laid down in the philosophy of Kant and Fichte, and a lofty idealism inspired the songs of her poets.  The intense effect of these spiritual agencies was realized in the outburst of heroic fury in 1813.  “Thus our classical literature, starting from a different point, reached the same goal as the political work of the Prussian monarchy”, [D] and of those men of action who pushed this work forward in the hour of direst ruin.

[Footnote C:  Ibid., i., p. 90.]

[Footnote D:  Ibid.]

The meeting of Napoleon and Goethe, two mighty conquerors, was an event in the world’s history.  On one side the scourge of God, the great annihilator of all survivals from the past, the gloomy despot, the last abortion of the revolution—­a

  “Part of the power that still
  Produces Good, while still devising Ill”;

on the other, the serenely grave Olympian who uttered the words, “Let man be noble, resourceful, and good”; who gave a new content to the religious sentiment, since he conceived all existence as a perpetual change to higher conditions, and pointed out new paths in science; who gave the clearest expression to all aspirations of the human intellect, and all movements of the German mind, and thus roused his people to consciousness; who finally by his writings on every subject showed that the whole realm of human knowledge was concentrated in the German brain; a prophet of truth, an architect of imperishable monuments which testify to the divinity in man.

The great conqueror of the century was met by the hero of intellect, to whom was to fall the victory of the future.  The mightiest potentate of the Latin race faced the great Germanic who stood in the forefront of humanity.

Truly a nation which in the hour of its deepest political degradation could give birth to men like Fichte, Scharnhorst, Stein, Schiller, and Goethe, to say nothing about the great soldier-figures of the wars of Liberation, must be called to a mighty destiny.