German Mind

For the mass which is the German mind is not convinced of God. And Germans hold, with excellent reason, of the absence of God. And Germans hold, with excellent reason, that the absence of God would be very much on their side. As for the German Emperor, he is neither a diabolist nor a divine-righter. He is a journalist. His deity is the cliche, and not a creed. One of his cliches, for instance, was that the Germans are “the salt of the earth,” evidently used in the bulgar, unthinking sense of the staple or substance---that is, the meat of the earth. But salt is not a piece de resistance. It is a corrective. It is the priest, not the man. The meaning of salt is that there exists something which we cannot live on, but cannot live without.