His successor, King Frederick-William IV., took up the notion with all the enthusiasm natural to his mystic character, and kept one of his most trusted statesmen and confidants busily employed for years in endeavoring to federate all the Reformed Churches, with the exception of that of England, under the protectorate and supremacy of the Hohenzollerns.  Emperor William goes still further.  He aspires to become, not merely the temporal head of the Lutheran Church throughout the world, but likewise its spiritual chief, its pontiff, in fact, in the same manner that the czar is the chief ecclesiastical dignitary and the duly consecrated spiritual head of the national Church of Russia.  William bases his claims to the dignity of a summus-episcopus on the fact that he is a titular bishop and archbishop, some nineteen times over, for his ancestors, when annexing the various petty states and sovereignties in bygone times, always made a point of getting the mitre with the crown, and the crozier with the purple and ermine.  Many of the petty states of Germany in mediaeval days were ruled, not by temporal rulers, but by archbishops possessing the rank of sovereign and the title of prince.

The ecclesiastical dignity was, in fact, inherent, and part and parcel of the sovereignty.  Consequently, when Emperor William’s ancestors acquired the one, they likewise secured possession of the other, and thus among his many ecclesiastical titles is that of Prince Archbishop of Silesia, and it is in his ecclesiastical capacity that he has conferred canonries and deaneries upon the military and civil members of his household.

Of course, the difficulty in the way of the emperor’s recognition as the supreme head of the Lutheran Church is the fact that the Lutheran faith is by no means confined to his dominions.  Lutherans constitute the major part of the population in Wuertemberg, Saxony and Baden, as well as in all the other non-Prussian states of the Confederation, save Bavaria.  Besides this, there are millions of Lutherans in Austro-Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia and Scandinavia, who could not recognize his supremacy without disloyalty to their own rulers, all of whom, with the exception of the king of Saxony, the Czar and the Austrian emperor, are, like himself, members of the Reformed Church.

His celebrated pilgrimage to Jerusalem a year ago, the first pilgrimage of a German emperor to the Holy Land since the days of the Crusades, clearly showed the trend of the kaiser’s aspirations.  He had invited all his fellow-Protestant monarchs to accompany him to Jerusalem, either in person or to send one of the princes of their houses as their representatives, and to ride in his train when he made his entry into the Holy City of Christendom.  But not one of the sovereigns thus invited responded to the invitation tendered, and William had no German or foreign prince with him during this memorable pilgrimage.