PULPITS OF HATE
The unpleasant part played by the clergy, and especially the
Lutheran pastors, needs to be explained to those who regard clerics
as necessarily men of peace.
The claim that the Almighty is on the side of Germany is not a new
one. It was made as far back as the time of Frederick the Great.
It was advanced in the war of 1870. It found strong voice at the
time of the Boer War, when the pastors issued a united manifesto
virulently attacking Great Britain.
These pastors are in communication with the German-American
Lutherans in the United States, who exerted their influence to the
utmost against the election of President Wilson, taking their
instructions indirectly from the German Foreign Office.
The state of affairs in the German churches is so different from
anything on the other side of the Atlantic, and in Great Britain,
that it is almost as difficult to make people in England understand
war-preaching ministers as it is to make them comprehend
war-teaching schoolmasters.
My description of the poisoning by hate songs of the child mind of
Germany at its most impressionable age came as a shock to many of
my readers. But the hate songs of the children are not as fierce
as the hate hymns and prayers of the pastors. Do the public here
realise that of the original Zeppelin fund hundreds of thousands of
marks were subscribed in churches and chapels, and that models of
Zeppelins have formed portions of church decorations at festivals?
The pastors of the Prussian State Church are in one important
respect the exact opposite of Martin Luther. He was thoroughly
independent in spirit and rebelled against authority; they are
abjectly submissive to it. As with the professor, so with the
pastor, it is no mere accident that he is a puppet-tool of the
State. The German Government leaves nothing to chance, and
realising to the fullest the importance of docile and unified
subjects both for interior rule and exterior conquest, it
deliberately and artfully regulates those who create public opinion.
There are some Lutheran pastors in Germany who work for an ideal,
who detest the propagation of hate. Why, one may naturally ask, do
they not cry out against such a pernicious practice? They cannot,
for they are muzzled. When a pastor enters this Church of which
the Supreme War Lord is the head, his first oath is unqualified
allegiance to his King and State. If he keeps his oath he can
preach no reform, for the State, being a perfect institution, can
have no flaw. If he breaks his oath, which happens when he raises
his voice in the slightest criticism, he is silenced. This means
that he must seek other means of earning a livelihood--a thing
almost impossible in a land where training casts a man in a rigid
mould. Thus these parsons have their choice between going on
quietly with their work and being nonentities in the public eye or
bespattering the non-Germanic section of the world with the mire of
hate. I regret to say that most of them choose the latter course.
While I was in Germany I read a lengthy and solicitous letter from
Pastor Winter, of Bruch, addressed to Admiral von Tirpitz, who had
just retired for the ostensible reason that he was unwell, but
whose illness was patently only diplomatic. The good pastor
expressed the hope that his early recovery would permit the admiral
to continue his noble work of obliterating England. Pastor Falk,
of Berlin, is a typical fire-eater. His Whitsuntide address was an
attack upon Anglo-Saxon civilisation and the urgent German mission
of smashing Britain and America. The Easter sermons of hate, one
of which I heard at Stettin, were especially bloodthirsty.
Congregations are larger than usual on that day, which is intended
to commemorate a spirit quite the opposite to hate. The clergy are
instructed not to attack Prance or Russia, and so it comes about
that, as I have previously pointed out, in Prussia, Hanover,
Schleswig-Holstein, Brandenburg, and Saxony, the pastors of the
State Church preach hatred of Britain, as violently in their
pulpits as in their pastoral visits.
The pulpit orators, taking their tip from the Government, are also
exhorting their congregations to "hold out and win the war." I
know of one pastor in a good section of Berlin, however, who has
recently lost considerable influence in his congregation. Sunday
after Sunday his text has been, "Wir mussen durchhalten!" (We must
hold out!) "No sacrifice should be too great for the Fatherland,
no privation, too arduous to be endured if one but has the spirit
to conquer." He paid particular attention to the rapidly
increasing number of people who grumble incessantly over the
shortage of food. The good man was clearly losing patience with
those who complained.
One day thieves broke into his home and got away with an enormous
amount of hams and other edibles. I remind the reader that ham had
ere this become unknown in Berlin. Less than three hundred pigs
were being killed there per week where formerly twenty-five
thousand were slaughtered. The Government had more-over taken a
house-to-house inventory of food, and hoarding had been made
punishable by law.
The story, of course, never appeared in the papers, since such
divines are useful implements of the State, but the whole
congregation heard of it, with the disastrous consequence that the
good man's future sermons on self-denial fell upon stony ground.
One dear old lady, a widow, whose two sons had fallen in the war,
told me that she had not gone to church for years, but after her
second son fell she sought spiritual comfort in attending services
every Sunday. "I am so lonesome now," she said, "and somehow I
feel that when I hear the word of God I shall be nearer to my boys."
I met her some weeks later on her way home from church. "It is no
use," she sighed, shaking her head sadly, "the church does not
satisfy the longing in my heart. It is not for such as me.
Nothing but war, war, war, and hate, hate, hate!"
The German Navy League, an aggressive body which had gathered
around it more than a million members previous to the war, stirred
up anti-British feeling by means of leaflets, newspaper articles,
kinematograph exhibitions, and sermons. Among the bitterest of the
preachers are returned missionaries from British possessions.
Although the social position of the pastor in a German village is
less than that of a minor Government official, yet he and his wife
wield considerable influence. The leading pastors receive each
week many of the Government propaganda documents, including a
digest carefully prepared for them by the foreign Press Department.
I obtained some copies of this weekly digest, but was unable to
bring them out of Germany. What purport to be extracts from the
London newspapers are ingenious distortions. Sometimes a portion
of an article is reprinted with the omission of the context, thus
entirely altering its meaning. The recipients of this carefully
prepared sheet believe implicitly in its authenticity. Any chance
remark of a political nobody in the House of Commons that seems
favourable to Germany is quoted extensively. Mr. Ramsay Macdonald,
in the eyes of the German village clergyman, ranks as one of the
most important men in the British Empire. Mr. Stanton, M.P., in
their view, is a low hireling of the British Government, doing
dirty work in the hope of getting political preferment. The
_Labour Leader_, which I have not seen in any house or hotel or on
any newspaper stall, is, according to this digest, one of the
leading English newspapers, and almost the only truth-telling organ
of the Allies.
These people really believe this. When home-staying Englishmen
talk to me about the German War party, I find it difficult to
explain to them that the German War party is practically the whole
country.
One or two better-travelled and better-educated pastors have
expressed mild regret at the bloodthirsty attitude of their
brethren in private conversation. But I never heard of one who had
the courage to "speak out in open meeting."
The modern, material Germany has not much use for religion except
as a factor in government. The notorious spread of extreme
agnosticism in the last quarter of a century renders it essential
for the clergy to hold their places by stooping to the violence of
the Professors. Mixed with their attitude of hostility to Britain
is a considerable amount of professional jealousy and envy. A
number of German pastors paid a visit to London some two or three
years before the outbreak of war, and I happened to meet one of
them recently in Germany. So far from being impressed by what he
had seen there, he had come to the conclusion that the English
clergy, and especially the Nonconformists, were an overpaid, and
undisciplined body, with no other aim than their personal comfort.
He had visited Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, Spurgeon's
Tabernacle, the City Temple, and had studied--so he told
me--English Wesleyanism and, Congregationalism in several
provincial centres. He was particularly bitter about one
Nonconformist who had accepted a large salary to go to the United
States. He returned to Germany impressed with the idea that the
Nonconformist and State Churches alike were a body of sycophants,
sharing the general decadent state of the English. What struck him
principally was what he referred to continually as the lack of
discipline and uniformity. Each man seemed to take his own point
of view, without any regard to the opinions of the particular
religious denomination to which he belonged. All were grossly
ignorant of science and chemistry, and all were very much overpaid.
Here, I think, lay the sting of his envy, and it is part of the
general jealousy of England, a country where everybody is supposed
to be underworked and overpaid.
The only worse country in this respect from the German point of
view is the United States, "where even the American Lutheran
pastors have fallen victims to the lust for money." The particular
Lutheran of whom I am speaking had been the guest of an English
Nonconformist minister and his wife, who had evidently tried to be
as hospitable as possible, and had no doubt put themselves out to
take him for excursions and outings in the Shakespeare country.
"It was nothing but eating and drinking and sightseeing," remarked
the Herr Pastor.
I suggested that he was a guest, to be looked after.
"I can assure you," he replied, "that Mr. ------ had nothing to do
all day but read the newspapers, and drink tea with his
congregation. He did not take the trouble to grow his own
vegetables, and all he had to do was to preach on Sundays and
attend a very unruly Sunday school. His wife, too, was not dressed
as one of ours."
He explained to me that his own life was very different. He eked
out his minute salary by a small scientifically managed farm, and I
gathered the impression that he was much more of a farmer than a
pastor, for he deplored his inability to obtain imported nitrates
owing to the blockade. The only question on which he was at all
unorthodox was that of the Junkers and their regrettable power of
holding potatoes, pigs, and other supplies while small men like him
had been obliged to sell. He had a good collection of modern
scientific agricultural works, of which the Germans have an
abundance.
But while admiring the energy of the great capitalists and the
rational Liberal Party, the average clergyman tends towards
sympathy with the Agrarians. The pastor of the small towns and
villages, who is very much under the thumb of the local Junker or
rich manufacturer, has as his highest ambition the hope that he and
his wife may be invited to coffee at least twice a year. The
pastor's wife is delighted to be condescendingly received by the
great lady. Herr Pastor talks agriculture with Herr Baron, and
Frau Pastor discusses past and coming incidents in the local birth
rate with Frau Baron. Snobbery has no greater exemplification than
in the relations of the local Lutheran pastor and the local
landlord or millionaire.
A sidelight on German mentality is contained in a little
conversation which I had with a clergyman in the Province of Posen.
He knew England well, by residence and by matrimonial connections.
This is how he explained the battle of the Somme. I give his own
words:--
"Many wounded men are coming back to our Church from the dreadful
Western front. They have been fighting the British, and they find
that so ignorant are the British of warfare that the British
soldiers on the Somme refuse to surrender, not knowing that they
are really beaten, with the result that terrible losses are
inflicted upon our brave troops."
In this exact report of a conversation is summed up a great deal of
German psychology.
For the Salvation Army a number of Germans have genuine respect,
because it seems to be organised on some military basis. The
Church of England they consider as degenerate as the Nonconformist.
Both, they think, are mere refuges for money-making ecclesiastics.