Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1930. ADOLF VON HARNACK

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 138, 14 June 1930, Page 8

Evening Post. SATURDAY, JUNE 14, 1930. ADOLF YON HARNACK

The death of Adolf yon Harnack which was reported on Thursday must have set many minds thinking of the early days of the War when the learned men of Germany mobilised for the purpose of impressing neutral opinion, and especially American opinion, with the righteousness of their country's cause. A reference to the most notorious of their efforts shows that he had a hand in it. At the foot of the manifesto in which 93 German professors, posing as "representatives of Science and Art" and "heralds of truth," sought to dispose of the most notorious of their country's crimes by the ingenuous device of setting them out seriatim and, without evidence or argument, denying them seriatim; most honoured of the names is that of "Adolf yon Harnack, General Director of the Royal Library, Berlin." It is not true that wo trespassed in neutral Belgium. ... It is not true that the life and property of a singlo Belgian citizen was injured by our soldiers without tho bitterest self-defence having raado it necessary. ..; It is not true that our troops treated Louvain brutally. ... It is not true that our warfaro pays no respect to international laws. And so on. It makes queer reading in these days, but though nobody would now be disposed to make too much of this striking proof that at a time of national excitement the intellectuals of a nation may be just as blind as the man in the street or the soldier who has been practising the goose-step for years, one would have preferred to know that the man who on the verge of his eightieth year has just gone to his rest had no hand in it. But at the very outset of the war Harnack had displayed his faith in his country's cause in a manner less unworthy of a man of learning than to the signing of this ridiculous manifesto. The address which he delivered at a German-American meeting held in the Berlin Town Hall on the 11th August, 1914, was tactful in its eloquent appeal to American friendship'and its almost complete exclusion of any express mention to England. Addressing his audience as "Citizens of the United States," Harnack said:— Because we have a common spirit that penetrates into the depth of our hearts, therefore wo are friends. And what sort of a spirit is it? It is the spirit of that deep religious and moral civilisation which we acquired during a scries of centuries, and from, which this strong American.shoot has arisen. There is tact for you! The religious and moral civilisation of America is represented as derived directly from Germany, without any obligation to the England whom Gott was about to "strafe." The bar sinister in the pedigree of American civilisation was not to be so much as mentioned to such an audience at such a time. A degree of tact astonishing in a Teutonic professor recalls that of the Greek poet who, having to celebrate the victory of a team of mules at Olympia, if we are not mistaken, and thinking that they had not much to boast of on the fathers' side, described them with a happy euphemism as "offspring of swift-footed mares." But it was impossible for Harnack to keep Britain entirely out of the picture, nor is it possible to read without a profound sympathy for the utter wreck of his hopes the single precise allusion that he allows himself to make to her in another context. This civilisation of ours, he says, tho most precious possession of the human race, was principally entrusted to three peoples, yes, to them alone! To us, to the Americans, and to tho English! That is all I will say. I veil my head in shame! Two of the three are left; they must stand together so much moreclosely, as it is the question of defending the flag of this civilisation. Tho whole is at stake, our intellectual existence, and the Americans must know that this means also their existence. We have a civilisation in common as well as tho duty of defending it! But, eitissens of America, we give you our sacred word that we shall stake the last penny of our money and the last drop of our blood on this civilisation. What Harnack thought of the ruthless submarine warfare to which Germany was ultimately driven, we do not know, but it is certain that it was this last desperate throw for, as he imagined, American civilisation as well as her own that brought America into the field on the other side and struck Germany to her knees. The pathos and the unconscious irony of" this astonishing speech reach an appropriate climax in its peroration. There had been a previous reference to Germany's peril on her eastern frontier from "the Mongolian-Muscovite civilisation," "the unorganised Asiatic mass," which, "like the desert with its sand, wants to cover up our field of grain." The speech concluded as follows:— From the East, I repeat, the sand of the desert approached us, from the West we are attacked b,y old enemies and faithless friends. How soon shall we Germans be able to pray and confess again: The Orient is God's, The Occident is God's, Northern and Southern lauds Best in tho peace of his hands. We hope that God will, give us the -strength to make this word true not

only for ourselves, but for all Europe. Till then, seeing nil the sources and wells of our higher life and of our existence threatened, wo will pray: Father, take care of our wells, And protect us from the Huns! What a strange choice of a word on which to perorate! The German word which is translated "civilisation" in the passages above quoted—"kul-tur"-—was to become a synonym during the next four years for cruel barbarism. The barbarians themselves were to attain a world-wide notoriety as "Huns." Though this learned German rrlttst have been the first to use the term, the conduct of his countrymen was to give it another application. We regret that the historical and dramatic interest of this single melancholy episode in the career of a great scholar prevents our attemptfug in this article even to outline the services to learning and to religion by which he has made the whole world his debtor. In his "Deulschland ueber AHes," Mr. John Tay Chapman, the distinguished American man of letters and publicist, says that no man in Germany and no scholar in all the world is more honoured than Professor llama ck. But at the same time he refers to the address from which wo ■ have quoted as making one wonder now far and how deeply Sunday-school learning over penetrates a man's real inner character. "Sunday-school learning" is hardly a fair term for one scholar to apply to another whom he admits to be justly honoured throughout the world, nor is there any ground for suggesting that Harnack's religion was a matter of learning which did not reach the heart. But the aberration of the critic may reasonably be attributed like that of the teacher to the effects of war which, as the poet says, "confounds the counsels of the wise." A complete answer both to Mr. Chapman's criticism and to anything that may seem to be implied in permanent disparagement of Harnack in anything we have said or quoted is supplied by Harnack himself. The last words of his Berlin lectures which have been translated into English under the title of "What is Christianity?" are as follows: — Gentlemen, it is religion, the love of God and neighbour, which gives lifo a meaning knowledge cannot do it. Let me, if you please, speak of my own experience, as one who for thirty years has taken an earnest interest in these things. Pure knowledge is a glorious thing, and woe to the man who holds it light or blunts his sense for it. But to the question, Whence, whither, and to what purpose, it gives an answer to-day as little as it did two or three thousand years ago. It does, indeed, instruct us in facts; it detects inconsistencies; it links phenomena; it corrects tire deceptions of sense and idea. But where and how the curve of the world and the curve of our own. life begin—that curve of which it sliows us only a section—• and whither this curve leads, knowledge docs not tell us. But if with a steady will we affirm the- 'forces and the standards which on the summits of our inner life shine out as our highest good, nay, as our real self; if wo are earnest and courageous enough to accept thorn as the great Bcality and direct our lives by them; and if we then look at the course of mankind's history, follow its upward development, and search, in strenuous and patient service, for the communion of minds in it, we shall not faint in weariness and despair, but become-certain of God, of the God whom Jesus Christ called Hl3 Father, and Who is also our Father. Religion was a deep and abiding reality to the man who could speak like that, and of incomparably greater importance than learning.