How Do I Find the Christ?

I have compared—and this can be done quite objectively—many passages in these essays with utterances, for example, of Hermann Grimm, who is.through and through a typical German, a typical Mid-European, of the nineteenth century—a man whose style of writing I admire as much as I dislike that of Woodrow Wilson. That is merely a personal aside. I love Hermann Grimm's style of writing and I find Woodrow Wilson's style repugnant, but for all that, one can be quite objective. Woodrow Wilson, the typical American, writes brilliantly about the development of the American character. And then something else struck me when I compared essays by him and by Hermann Grimm, in which both of them have written about the methodology of history. Passages of Woodrow Wilson tally exactly, almost literally, with passages of Hermann Grimm; passages of Hermann Grimm can simply be transposed into statements by Woodrow Wilson. There is, of course, no question whatever of plagiarism; I do not for one instant suggest that, for it is absolutely out of the question. But here, without becoming bourgeois or philistine, we can learn that when two men say the same thing, it is not the same! Here is the problem. Is it not remarkable that Woodrow Wilson describes his Americans really much more penetratingly, much more suggestively, than anything described by Hermann Grimm when he is writing of methodology in history, and that yet in his descriptions, Woodrow Wilson uses practically the same passages as Hermann Grimm? What is the explanation? It is a real problem.