So it has been up to now. Wherever there has been true government, wherever bitter struggles have been endured, wherever victory has been won in the face of mighty opposition, there it has been that promise of eternal life which governed and struggled and won the victory. Believing in that promise the German Protestants, already mentioned in these addresses, entered upon the struggle. Do you think they did not know that peoples could be governed by that old belief too, and held together in law and order, and that under the old belief men could procure a comfortable existence? Why, then, did their princes decide upon armed resistance, and why did the peoples enthusiastically make such resistance? It was for heaven and for eternal bliss that they willingly poured out their blood. But what earthly power could have penetrated to the Holy of holies in their souls and rooted out their belief–a belief which had been revealed to them once for all, and on which alone they based their hope of bliss? Thus it was not their own bliss for which they fought–this was already assured to them; it was the bliss of their children and of their grandchildren as yet unborn and of all posterity as yet unborn. These, too, should be brought up in that same doctrine, which had appeared to them as the only means of salvation. These, too, should partake of the salvation that had dawned for them. This hope alone it was that was threatened by the enemy. For it, for an order of things that long after their death should blossom on their graves, they so joyfully shed their blood. Let us admit that they were not entirely clear in their own minds, that they made mistakes in their choice of words to denote the noblest that was in them, and with their lips did injustice to their souls; let us willingly confess that their confession of faith was not the sole and exclusive means of becoming a partaker of the heaven beyond the grave; nonetheless it is eternally true that more heaven on this side of the grave, a braver and more joyful look from earth upward, and a freer stirring of the spirit have entered by their sacrifice into the whole life of succeeding ages. To this very day the descendants of their opponents, just as much as we ourselves, their own descendants, enjoy the fruits of their labors.
In this belief our earliest common forefathers, the original stock of the new culture, the Germans, as the Romans called them, bravely resisted the on-coming world dominion of the Romans. Did they not have before their eyes the greater brilliance of the Roman provinces next to them and the more refined enjoyments in those provinces, to say nothing of laws and judges’ seats and lictors’ axes and rods in superfluity? Were not the Romans willing enough to let them share in all these blessings? In the case of several of their own princes, who did no more than intimate that war against such benefactors of mankind was rebellion, did they not experience proofs of the belauded Roman clemency? To those who submitted the Romans gave marks of distinction in the form of kingly titles, high commands in their armies, and Roman fillets; and if they were driven out by their countrymen, did not the Romans provide for them a place of refuge and a means of subsistence in their colonies? Had they no appreciation of the advantages of Roman civilization, e.g., of the superior organization of their armies, in which even an Arminius did not disdain to learn the trade of war? They cannot be charged with ignorance or lack of consideration of any one of these things. Their descendants, as soon as they could do so without losing their freedom, even assimilated Roman culture, so far as this was possible without losing their individuality. Why, then, did they fight for several generations in bloody wars, that broke out again and again with ever renewed force? A Roman writer puts the following expression into the mouth of their leaders: “What was left for them to do, except to maintain their freedom or else to die before they became slaves.” Freedom to them meant just this: remaining Germans and continuing to settle their own affairs independently and in accordance with the original spirit of their race, going on with their development in accordance with the same spirit, and propagating this independence in their posterity. All those blessings which the Romans offered them meant slavery to them, because then they would have to become something that was not German, they would have to become half Roman. They assumed as a matter of course that every man would rather die than become half a Roman, and that a true German could only want to live in order to be, and to remain, just a German and to bring up his children as Germans.
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