GERMANY'S POOR PROGRESS.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXX, Issue 57, 23 October 1914, Page 4

GERMANY'S POOR PROGRESS.

A writer in the Commercial Record discussing Germany's treachery, remarks that the very fact of Germany assailing the independence of Belgium furnishes a "most striking illustration that she has made but extremely pooi progress upon the point of civilisation since IS7O, and goes 911 to remind us that it was in this particular year that "Letters on the State of Religion in Germany," which appeared in the London Times, aroused considerable attention in Britain. Their correspondent said that the Prussian Minister, who, as a man at the head of the education of the most intellectual people in learned and inquiring Germany, makes it his business to compel the elementary and normal school? to teach as little as possible for fear of teaching something unorthodox, and in all ways

directs a policy which attempts systematically to oppose a bar to the progress of free-thought. It may be doubted if any organisation in the' world ever produced anything to equal the following penitential effusion which we are told occurs in a church hymnbook, recently forced by the Minister | upon certain Protestant congregations] in the old provinces of Prussia. Trans-j latcd, the hymn commences thus: "Almighty God, I am content to re- : main the dog I am. lam a dog, a despicable dog. I am conscious of revelling in sin, and there is no infamy in which Ido not indulge. My anger and my quarrelling are like a dog's. My abuse and snappishness are like a dog's. My robbing and devouring are like a dog's. Nay, when I coiiie to..reflect on it, I cannot but own that iu very many things I behave worse than the dogs themselves." This, at any rate, in the light of the happenings of 1914 and the exposure of Prussian trickery and treacherous cunning which has come about, the civilised world will not find it hard to believe. As was stated at the time, the fragment was doubtless worth preserving, although this specimen of the hymn book forced upon certain of the old Prussian congregations was by no means the worst that could be cited. In its criticism at the time, a well known weekly review remarked: "A man must know a great deal, and be able to use his knowledge well, to be competent to draw pictures worth anything of the real state of .religious thought in Germany, and to judge with discrimination of its real and apparent tendencies. The clever writer of the Times has no doubt some strongly marked forms of opinion before him ; they have impressed him deeply, and probably he has not overstated their characteristics, but we see no reason to think that he is qualified -to lay down, in the broad way in which he does, that these characteristics fairly represent the general state of religious thought existing in Germany. If they do, it is a fact' of the first importance, and one which must affect most deeply the future of Europe and the world." In British eyes, we have indeed witnessed the sequel in the year 1914 to the feeding of the Prussian on such religious matter; and the world is indeed suffering therefrom.