Now, if you go to
a beer-garden in Berlin you may, any Sunday afternoon, see
doctors of divinity--none of your rationalists--but doctors of
real divinity, to whom American theologians go to be taught,
doing this very thing, and, what is worse, smoking pipes. An
American who applied to this the same course of reasoning which
he would apply to a similar scene in America, would simply be
guilty of outrageous folly. If he argued from it that the German
doctor was selfish, or did not "live as in the sight of God," the
whole process would be a model of absurdity.
Foreigners have drawn, on the other hand, from the American
"diligence in business," conclusions with regard to American
character far more uncomplimentary than those the _Christian Union_
has expressed with regard to the Prussians. There are not a few
religious and moral and cultivated circles in Europe in which the
suggestion that Americans, as a nation, were characterized by
thoughtfulness for others and a sense of God's presence would be
received with derisive laughter, owing to the application to the
phenomena of American society of the process of reasoning on which,
we fear, the _Union_ relies.
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