Civic freedom, speaking with the Son of God, is not yet true freedom, freedom in the highest sense. [ . . . ] Where the mind of a people is focused on nothing but emancipation from [the rule of] other people, there is born a kind of haughtiness that no longer wishes to tolerate any bond of dependency that binds us to human beings: not that of reverence, not that of gratitude, not that of piety; there even all differences of rank and hierarchy among people are to vanish. The state is a body, a body has various parts, unequal in honor and dignity, though all are necessary for the existence of the body, ruling and serving parts, ear and eye, feet and hand; but where haughtiness has awakened in the wake of an enthusiastic urge for freedom, the parts no longer wish to accept the place that God has assigned them in the body, every member wants to be eye and ear. Such dizziness of freedom gives birth to arrogance toward people, for it is itself born of arrogance toward God. The Epistle of Juda speaks of godless people, dreamers they are called, and it is said that because they despise God, they also despise authority and blaspheme against majesties. Among all feelings of reverence, the reverence for God is the oldest and most venerable. But he who has ceased to genuflect to divine majesty, how will he still accept among humans a scepter that was received by God in fief, and which no hand of flesh and blood may touch? And whosoever refuses to accept that there are brows that birth and nature herself has shaped into a diadem wreath, how reluctant he will be to still bow to those whom God has installed as the nobler parts of the body of humanity! Behold the horror of a revolution where, against law and justice, the hand from below reaches for the scepter to break it, how at the same time all bonds of reverence, piety, and obedience are cast off by the unleashed haughtiness. O this one, first breach of the law, which an entire people sanctifies, what an army of broken laws and oaths, of haughty acts of violence, and blasphemous desires it brings in its wake! The German saying goes: Once the bread is cut, all wanton children will cut a slice from it. This spirit of haughtiness has now gone out among old and young. Young men of this university, your name has been preserved unsullied in this pervasive defilement; in those fateful days, right and law meant more to you than intoxicating praise in the newspapers; with the prudence that adorns men, you kept to the narrow but firm and straight road of progress in accordance with the law. You know that the weeds of arrogance and haughtiness grow more rampant in youth than in any other age, therefore be alert, alert, and if you wish to learn, in these seductive times, to bend your knee before lawful, human authorities, learn to bend it before God! Behold further the terrible fruit of such enthusiasm for freedom in the blindness of the Jews: “We were never in bondage to any man,” they dare to say, and forget their long captivity and do not wish to acknowledge that the
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