The Meaning of Christianity

Changing somewhat the meaning, we may apply to Père Lagrange what St. Paul says of himself: "To the Greeks and to the Barbarians I am a debtor." In his work Le Sens du Christianisme d'après l'Exégèse Allemande now translated into English under the title The Meaning of Christianity according to Luther and his Followers in Germany, he is concerned to show how the effort to create a distinctively German religion, which should be imposed upon the rest of the world by the ascendancy of the German peoples and of their culture, was doomed to failure ; but at the same time he does not forget to discharge a simple debt of justice.Rome, the heiress of the ancient civilization and the teacher of the Christian faith, he reminds us in his Preface, educated the German barbarians; and Germany brought new forces to Rome. In the great body of Christendom, Germany represented a distinct civilization-distinct, indeed, but one which was not isolated. Even after Luther, Germany, for a long time, seemed as careful to maintain her place in the concert of European nations as she was to show independence of Rome. Even when, at the end of the eighteenth century, she made up her mind to keep more to herself, she yet sheltered her own renaissance under the genius of Shakespeare, and Goethe urged her to draw from Greek sources a sense of proportion and of form, to borrow from the French Theatre its nobility and its beauty

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