[86] This has been perfectly obvious to all those guardians of the spiritual who have condemned it, whatever their motives may have been. More precisely, Maurras’s work makes the passion of man to found the State (or to strengthen it) an object of religious adoration; it is really the worldly made transcendental. This displacing of the transcendental is the secret of the great influence exerted by Maurras on his contemporaries. These persons, especially in irreligious France, were plainly eager for such a doctrine, if one may judge by the outburst of gratitude with which they greeted it, and which seems to say: ‘At last we are delivered from God; at last we are allowed to adore ourselves in our will to be great, not in our will to be good; we are shown the ideal in the real, on earth and not in heaven.’ In this sense, Maurras’s work is the same as Nietzsche’s (‘be faithful to the earth’), with this difference, that the German thinker deifies man in his anarchic passions, and the Frenchman in his organising passions. It is also the same as the work of Bergson and James, inasmuch as it says like them: the real is the only ideal. This _secularizing of the divine_ may be compared with the work of Luther. [87] Machiavellian morality is plainly proclaimed in the following lines, where every open-minded person will recognize, except for the tone, the teaching of _all_ the present teachers of realism, whatever their nationality: ‘In his relations with other States, the Prince should know neither law nor right, except the right of the strongest. These relations place in his hands, under his responsibility, the divine rights of the Destiny and government of the world, and raise him above the precepts of individual morality into a higher moral order, whose content is enshrined in the words: Salus populi suprema lex esto.’ (Fichte, quoted by Andler, op. cit., p. 33.) The advance on Machiavelli is obvious. [88] The teaching of this writer may be put in this form: ‘All that is good from the point of view of politics is good; _and I know no other criterion of good_.’ This enables him to say that he makes no pronouncement in matters of private morality. [89] In Richelieu’s _Testament politique_ and the _Mémoires de Louis XIV pour l’Instruction du Dauphin_, the catalogue of good and ill might be signed by Saint Vincent de Paul. We read in them: ‘Kings should take care in making treaties, but once the treaties are made, _they must observe them religiously_. I know that many politicians teach the contrary; but, without taking into consideration all that the Christian Faith provides us with against these maxims, I maintain that since the loss of honour is greater than the loss of life itself, a great Prince should hazard his person and _even the interest of his State rather than break his word_, which he cannot violate without losing his reputation, and consequently _the greatest strength_ of a Sovereign.’ (_Testament Politique_, part 2, ch. vi.)