Europe and the Church, Part 11: Germany's Dream of Conquest
At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the country of Germany did not even exist. But a century later it had risen to seriously challenge the greatest European empires and forever change the history of the world.
by Melvin Rhodes
The year 1914 saw "the outbreak of war on a scale unknown and undreamed of in all history" (The Book of Knowledge, Vol. 7, 1954, p. 478).
Less than one 14th of the world's population escaped the greatest conflict in history.
Known as the Great War until, 25 years later, a second world war followed, the 1914-18 war saw the end of the old order. A world that had been dominated for four centuries by European empires witnessed the collapse of most of them. Only the British and French empires survived. These two powers were among the victors. But even they lost their empires in the aftermath of the second conflict that inevitably followed the first.
The central power that was their adversary was Germany, a country that did not even exist at the end of the Napoleonic period a century earlier.
At the Congress of Vienna, held after Napoleon was exiled to Elba, leaders of over 200 different sovereign European countries laid the foundation for a century of relative peace on the continent. This century coincided with the Pax Britannica, the century of British dominance that came about largely due to Britain's command of the seas. British dominions and colonies scattered the globe forming the "multitude of nations" that was promised to Joseph's son Ephraim in Genesis 48. It was also the period of American expansion westward as the United States fulfilled the birthright promise to Ephraim's brother Manasseh to become a great single nation (verse 19).
