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The second leader, Pastor Dr. Lepsius, went farther with this thought in the direction of a positive Christian foundation. Lepsius made a name for himself several years ago, at the time of the Turkish persecution of the Armenians, by a warm plea for aid to the Armenians by action on the part of the German state. At that time he urged that the German government ought to intervene for the protection of persecuted Christians, and undertook a great scheme of aid for the Armenians. When he desired to give lectures throughout Germany for that purpose the ecclesiastical authorities refused permission ; whereupon he voluntarily laid down his pastoral office in order to devote him- self to labor for the persecuted Armenians. It is easy to under- stand that Lepsius would wish to add to the purely humane argument of the first orator a more positively Christian element. According to him it is the duty of a world-power that it win the nations for the gospel. In the establishment of Christian world- powers a part of the reign of Christ is established over the peoples. Germany is called to gain this world-power by the physical claims of superfluous population, and, on the other side, religiously, by the superiority of Protestantism over the Romish and Slavic religions. But it must deepen in itself these strong religious motives, so far as they are defective, for these alone make them capable of fulfilling their religious duty in world-politics.
That which both orators had in common was that it is mor- ally repugnant to urge purely economical and political motives for a national policy of expansion. Their demand is that there must be moral and religious motives, active and dominant, in the consciousness of the persons concerned, in order to give to world-politics a moral justification. Against this the well-known leader of the National Socialists, Friedrich Naumann, formerly a pastor, raised an energetic protest, which appeared to us entirely right. With great applause from one part of the assembly he declared that the only motive of world-politics in every people is self-preservation. If at the present on the entire continent there rules an unfriendly feeling toward Eng- land, it is not because England has a policy of expansion, but
