The Sleepwalkers (65 page)

Rebel and criminal, they both bring their own order, their own conceptions of value into the existing regime. But while the rebel wants to subjugate the existing regime, the criminal seeks to fit himself into it.
The deserter belongs neither to the one category nor the other, or perhaps he belongs to both. Huguenau may have felt this, now that he was faced with the task of setting up his own little world of reality on the outposts of that greater order and of adapting the one to the other, and even if he agreed that deserters should be sentenced to death by rifle fire, that was irrelevant for the time being, and the fact that the
Kur-Trier Herald
represented in his eyes a part of a great machine, say, a brass-plated joint where the bars met and were clamped together, a point at which the country where his own law ruled met that other one whose laws he reverenced and loved, into which he was resolved to make his way and in which he wished to dwell; this fact was not merely nonsensical; it was no more nonsensical than the language of his dreams. And all these motives were jointly responsible for the need that Huguenau felt to get hold of the
Kur-Trier Herald
; they also provide an explanation for the complete success of his transaction.

Then the devil leaveth him, and, behold, angels came and ministered unto him.—M
ATTHEW
iv.
II
.

Although the change in the editorial policy of this paper is but a trifling occurrence compared with the mighty event whose anniversary we may soon be seeing for the fourth time, yet it seems to me that, as so often is the case, we must here too regard the smaller event as a mirror of the greater.

For we too and this paper of ours stand at a parting of the ways, we too have the desire to take a new and better path which will lead us nearer to the truth, and we nurse the faith that as far as it is permitted to human powers we shall

where is the devil whom we must drive out from amidst us, where the angel whom we can call to our aid?

It beseems an old soldier to speak his mind bluntly, even at the risk that what he says may seem untimely to many people

to free ourselves from the iron embrace of the enemy nations, but also to release the Fatherland and with it the whole world from the unclean spirit which

not to be wondered at that the nations should be visited with hundredfold dissension and thousandfold disunion. For in the member with which you have sinned shall you be punished.

I hear someone objecting that in that case we should simply submit to the punishment, endure the scourge, and turn the other cheek to the persecut-

just as Luther’s struggle against a Popedom which had grown corrupt was a justified struggle. And does not our master Clausewitz teach us that the spirit of righteousness is one of the weapons of war, which

it shall be said of our struggle: “His foes fled in terror before him, the evil-doer was abashed, and salvation was in his hands” (Maccabees iii. 6), yet we must not fix our thoughts on the pursuit of the flying foe, but on salvation, the salvation of our own as of other nations. We have been shortsighted, and in very truth all our sacrifices will have been in vain, if they are regarded frivolously, and God’s

possesses that outward freedom which we have to fight for, only when at the same time that inward and truly divine freedom is vouchsafed
to it. And we shall achieve that freedom not on our battlefields, victorious as we may be there, but we shall find it only in our hearts. For that inward freedom is commensurate with the faith which the world stands now in danger of losing. So the war is not only

according to the Scriptures? “Good and pious works will never make a man good and pious, but a good and pious man will do good and pious works,” asserted Luther, writing of Christian freedom, and he goes on: “But if works can make no man pious, and a man must be pious before he can do good works, then it is evident that only the faith granted us by infinite grace through Christ

and John says (iii. 30) “He must increase, but I must decrease,” and so it was with the war, which had to increase that our faith might decrease, and until our faith is re-born to blossom anew, until that happens this war may not be able to come to an end. Evil for the mere sake of evil

and it almost seems to us that first the black hordes will have to be let loose on the whole world, so that out of the fires of the Apocalypse the new brotherhood and fellowship may arise, so that once more the kingdom of Christ may be established, and new and glorious.