[121] There will be found in Barrès (_Une Enquête aux pays du Levant_, chap. vii: ‘Les derniers fidèles du Vieux de la Montagne’) a striking example of admiration for the cult of honour inasmuch as this cult, when ably exploited by an intelligent leader, gives practical results. [122] This is especially the case with Montaigne who, as everyone knows, extols honour insofar as it is man’s sensitiveness to the judgment of his conscience, but very little insofar as it is a desire for glory--‘put off with other pleasures that which comes from the approbation of others.’ Barrès believes he sees in that ‘a foreigner who does not share our prejudices’. Barrès confuses the moralists and the poets. Before him I do not know one French author with dogmatic claims who has attributed a high moral value to the love of glory; the French moralists before 1890 are very unmilitary, even the soldiers like Vauvenargues and Vigny. (See the excellent study of G. Le Bidois, _L’Honneur au miroir de nos lettres_, especially on Montesquieu.) [123] The Abbé Sertillanges, _L’Héroisme et la Gloire_. Compare this with Bossuet’s two sermons on ‘The Honour of the World’. You can measure the advance made by the Church during three centuries in its concessions to lay passions. See also Nicole: ‘On the true idea of valour.’ The sermons of the Abbé Sertillanges (‘la Vie Héroïque’) should be read entire, as a monument of a Churchman’s enthusiasm for warlike instincts. It is positively the manifesto of a helmed ‘clerk’. You can find in them such emotions as the following which, mutatis mutandis, might be an extract from the Regimental Orders of a Colonel of the Death’s Head Hussars: ‘Behold Guynemer, the young hero, the simple soul with the eagle glance, the slim Hercules, the Achilles who does not retire to his tent, the Roland of the clouds and the Cid of the French sky: was there ever a wilder and more furious paladin, more careless of death, whether his own or that of an enemy? This “kid”, as his comrades called him, only enjoyed the savage pleasure of attack, of the hard fight, of the clear victory, and in him the arrogance of the conqueror was at once charming and terrible.’ [124] Let me recall Thomas Aquinas’s definition of honour, which is not exactly the definition of the honour extolled by the Abbé Sertillanges: ‘Honour is good (like the love of human glory) on condition that charity is its principle, and the love of God or the good of one’s neighbour as its object.’ [125] See the recent Bill to amend Martial Law, known as the Paul Boncour Bill. [126] This suggestive remark is Lavisse’s, _Etudes d’Histoire de Prusse_, page 30. See the whole passage. [127] Love here is obviously love for the superior species--to which the preacher naturally belongs. Doubtless it is this love also which permits of a pity which is not ‘perverted.’