“In my letter to Mr. Gladstone, I have maintained the lawfulness
and the apostolic character of the German Protestant Church. You
will find the style changed in this work, bolder and more free.”
Attacks, indeed, became frequent, and more and more bitter, but Bunsen
seldom took any notice of them. He writes:—
“Hare is full of wrath at an attack made upon me in the ‘Christian
Remembrancer’—in a very Jesuitical way insinuating that I ought
not to have so much influence allowed me. Another article
execrates the bishopric of Jerusalem as an abomination. This zeal
savors more of hatred than of charity.”
But though Bunsen felt far too firmly grounded in his own Christian faith
to be shaken by such attacks upon himself, he too could be roused to wrath
and indignation when the poisoned arrows of theological Fijians were shot
against his friends. When speaking of the attacks on Arnold, he writes:—
“Truth is nothing in this generation except a means, in the best
case, to something good; but never, like virtue, considered as
good, as the good,—the object in itself. X dreams away in
twilight. Y is sliding into Puseyism. Z (the Evangelicals) go on
thrashing the old straw. I wish it were otherwise; but I love
England, with all her faults. I write to you, now only to you, all
I think. All the errors and blunders which make the Puseyites a
stumbling-block to so many,—the rock on which they split is no
other than what Rome split upon, self-righteousness, out of want
of understanding justification by faith, and hovering about the
unholy and blasphemous idea of atoning for our sins, because they
feel not, understand not, indeed, believe not, _the Atonement_,
and therefore enjoy not the glorious privileges of the children of
God,—the blessed duty of the sacrifice of thanksgiving through Him
who atoned for them. Therefore no sacrifice,—therefore no
Christian priesthood,—no Church. By our fathers these ideas were
fundamentally acknowledged; they were in abeyance in the worship
of the Church, but not on the domestic altar and in the hymns of
the spirit. With the Puseyites, as with the Romanists, these ideas
are cut off at the roots. O when will the Word of God be brought
up against them? What a state this country is in! The land of
liberty rushing into the worst slavery, the veriest thralldom!”
To many people it might have seemed as if Bunsen during all this time was
too much absorbed in English interests, political, theological, and
social, that he had ceased to care for what was passing in his own
country. His letters, however, tell a different tale. His voluminous
correspondence with the King of Prussia, though not yet published, will
one day bear witness to Bunsen’s devotion to his country, and his
enthusiastic attachment to the house of Hohenzollern. From year to year he
was urging on the King and his advisers the wisdom of liberal concessions,
and the absolute necessity of action. He was working at plans for
constitutional reforms; he went to Berlin to rouse the King, to shame his
ministers, to insist in season and out of season on the duty of acting
before it was too late. His faith in the King is most touching. When he
goes to Berlin in 1844, he sees everywhere how unpopular the King is, how
even his best intentions are misunderstood and misrepresented. Yet he goes
on working and hoping, and he sacrifices his own popularity rather than
oppose openly the suicidal policy that might have ruined Prussia, if
Prussia could have been ruined. Thus he writes in August, 1845:—
“To act as a statesman at the helm, in the Fatherland, I consider
not to be in the least my calling: what I believe to be my calling
is to be mounted high before the mast, to observe what land, what
breakers, what signs of coming storm there may be, and then to
announce them to the wise and practical steersman. It is the same
to me whether my own nation shall know in my life-time or after my
death how faithfully I have taken to heart its weal and woe, be it
in Church or State, and borne it on my heart as my nearest
interest, as long as life lasted. I give up the point of making
myself understood in the present generation. Here (in London) I
consider myself to be upon the right spot. I seek to preserve
peace and unity, and to remove dissatisfaction, wherever it is
possible.”
Nothing, however, was done. Year after year was thrown away, like a
Sibylline leaf, and the penalty for the opportunities that had been lost
became heavier and heavier. The King, particularly when he was under the
influences of Bunsen’s good genius, was ready for any sacrifice. “The
commotion,” he exclaimed, in 1845, “can only be met and overcome by
freedom, absolute freedom.” But when Bunsen wanted measures, not words,
the King himself seemed powerless. Surrounded as he was by men of the most
opposite characters and interests, and quite capable of gauging them
all,—for his intellect was of no common stamp,—he could agree with all of
them to a certain point, but could never bring himself to go the whole
length with any one of them. Bunsen writes from Berlin: “My stay will
certainly not be a long one; the King’s heart is like that of a brother
toward me, but our ways diverge. The die is cast, and he reads in my
countenance that I deplore the throw. He too fulfills his fate, and we
with him.”
When, at last, in 1847, a Constitution was granted by the King, it was too
late. Sir Robert Peel seems to have been hopeful, and in a letter of
twenty-two pages to Bunsen he expressed an opinion that the Prussian
government might still be able to maintain the Constitution if only
sincere in desiring its due development, and prepared in mind for that
development. To the King, however, and to the party at court, the
Constitution, if not actually hateful, was a mere plaything, and the idea
of surrendering one particle of his independence never entered the King’s
mind. Besides, 1848 was at the door, and Bunsen certainly saw the coming
storm from a distance, though he could not succeed in opening the eyes of
those who stood at the helm in Prussia. Shortly before the hurricane broke
loose, Bunsen had once more determined to throw up his official position,
and retire to Bonn. But with 1848 all these hopes and plans were scattered
to the winds. Bunsen’s life became more restless than ever, and his body
was gradually giving way under the constant tension of his mind. “I feel,”
he writes in 1848 to Archdeacon Hare, “that I have entered into a new
period of life. I have given up all private concerns, all studies and
researches of my own, and live entirely for the present political
emergencies of my country, to stand or to fall by and with it.”
With his love for England he deeply felt the want of sympathy on the part
of England for Prussia in her struggle to unite and regenerate the whole
of Germany. “It is quite entertaining,” he writes, with a touch of irony
very unusual in his letters, “to see the stiff unbelief of the English in
the future of Germany. Lord John is merely uninformed. Peel has somewhat
staggered the mind of the excellent Prince by his unbelief; yet he has a
statesmanlike good-will towards the _Germanic_ nations, and even for the
_German_ nation. Aberdeen is the greatest sinner. He believes in God and
the Emperor Nicholas!” The Schleswig-Holstein question embittered his
feelings still more; and in absence of all determined convictions at
Berlin, the want of moral courage and political faith among those in whose
hands the destinies of Germany had been placed, roused him to wrath and
fury, though he could never be driven to despair of the future of Prussia.
For a time, indeed, he seemed to hesitate between Frankfort, then the seat
of the German Parliament, and Berlin; and he would have accepted the
Premiership at Frankfort if his friend Baron Stockmar had accepted the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs. But very soon he perceived that, however
paralyzed for the moment, Prussia was the only possible centre of life for
a regeneration of Germany; that Prussia could not be merged in Germany,
but that Germany had to be resuscitated and reinvigorated through Prussia.
His patriotic nominalism, if we may so call his youthful dreams of a
united Germany, had to yield to the force of that political realism which
sacrifices names to things, poetry to prose, the ideal to the possible.
What made his decision easier than it would otherwise have been to a heart
so full of enthusiasm was his personal attachment to the King and to the
Prince of Prussia. For a time, indeed, though for a short time only,
Bunsen, after his interview with the King in January, 1849, believed that
his hopes might still be realized, and he seems actually to have had the
King’s promise that he would accept the crown of a United Germany, without
Austria. But as soon as Bunsen had left Berlin, new influences began to
work on the King’s brain; and when Bunsen returned, full of hope, he was
told by the King himself that he had never repented in such a degree of
any step as that which Bunsen had advised him to take; that the course
entered upon was a wrong to Austria; that he would have nothing to do with
such an abominable line of politics, but would leave that to the Ministry
at Frankfort. Whenever the personal question should be addressed to him,
then would he reply as one of the Hohenzollern, and thus live and die as
an honest man. Bunsen, though mourning over the disappointed hopes that
had once centred in Frederick William IV., and freely expressing the
divergence of opinion that separated him from his sovereign, remained
throughout a faithful servant and a loyal friend. His buoyant spirit,
confident that nothing could ruin Prussia, was looking forward to the
future, undismayed by the unbroken succession of blunders and failures of
Prussian statesmen,—nay, enjoying with a prophetic fervor, at the time of
the deepest degradation of Prussia at Olmütz, the final and inevitable
triumph of that cause which counted among its heroes and martyrs such
names as Stein, Gneisenau, Niebuhr, Arndt, and, we may now add, Bunsen.
After the reaction of 1849 Bunsen’s political influence ceased altogether,
and as Minister in England he had almost always to carry out instructions
of which he disapproved. More and more he longed for rest and freedom, for
“leisure for reflection on the Divine which subsists in things human, and
for writing, if God enables me to do so. I live as one lamed; the pinions
that might have furthered my progress are bound,—yet not broken.” Yet he
would not give up his place as long as his enemies at Berlin did all they
could to oust him. He would not be beaten by them, nor did he altogether
despair of better days. His opinion of the Prince of Prussia (the present
King) had been raised very high since he had come to know him more
intimately, and he expected much in the hour of need from his soldier-like
decision and sense of honor. The negotiations about the Schleswig-Holstein
question soon roused again all his German sympathies, and he exerted
himself to the utmost to defend the just cause of the
Schleswig-Holsteiners, which had been so shamefully misrepresented by
unscrupulous partisans. The history of these negotiations cannot yet be
written, but it will some day surprise the student of history when he
finds out in what way public opinion in England was dosed and stupefied on
that simple question. He found himself isolated and opposed by nearly all
his English friends. One statesman only, but the greatest of English
statesmen, saw clearly where the right and where the wrong was, but even
he could only dare to be silent. On the 31st of July, 1850, Bunsen
writes:—
“Palmerston had yielded, when in a scrape, first to Russia, then
to France; the prize has been the protocol; the victim, Germany.
They shall never have my signature to such a piece of iniquity and
folly.”
However, on the 8th of May, 1852, Bunsen had to sign that very piece of
iniquity. It was done, machine like, at the King’s command; yet, if Bunsen
had followed his own better judgment, he would not have signed, but sent
in his resignation. “The first cannon-shot in Europe,” he used to say,
“will tear this Pragmatic Sanction to tatters;” and so it was; but alas!
he did not live to see the Nemesis of that iniquity. One thing, however,
is certain, that the humiliation inflicted on Prussia by that protocol was
never forgotten by one brave soldier, who, though not allowed at that time
to draw his royal sword, has ever since been working at the reform of
Prussia’s army, till on the field of Sadowa the disgrace of the London
protocol and the disgrace of Olmütz were wiped out together, and German
questions can no longer be settled by the Great Powers of Europe, “with or
without the consent of Prussia.”
Bunsen remained in England two years longer, full of literary work,
delighted by the success of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition, entering
heartily into all that interested and agitated English society, but
nevertheless carrying in his breast a heavy heart. Prussia and Germany
were not what he wished them to be. At last the complications that led to
the Crimean War held out to his mind a last prospect of rescuing Prussia
from her Russian thralldom. If Prussia could have been brought over to
join England and France, the unity of Northern Germany might have been her
reward, as the unity of Italy was the reward of Cavour’s alliance with the
Western Powers. Bunsen used all his influence to bring this about, but he
used it in vain, and in April, 1854, he succumbed, and his resignation was
accepted.