ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book covers a historical span of about seventy years, the Biblical life of man. In the first forty-three of these years, the German nation, united for the first time in its history, enjoyed unparalleled prosperity, political power, and economic expansion. In the centuries when England and France laid the foundations on which the structure of their unified states was built, the German people was split into hundreds of principalities and free cities, which fought and conquered one another according to the greater or lesser ambition and ability of their rulers. When in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Reformation broke up the Catholic world, the religious wars of Europe were fought on German soil, by Germans against Germans, to the complete exhaustion of the physical substance of the German people and of its intellectual and economic life.
