This glorifying of national particularism, so unexpected among all ‘clerks’ is especially so among those whom I described as ‘pre-eminently clerks’--the Churchmen. Those who for centuries have exhorted men, at least theoretically, to deaden the feeling of their differences in order to take cognizance of each other in the divine essence which brings all men together, have now come to praise them, according to where the sermon is given, for their ‘fidelity to the French soul’, for ‘the immutability of their German consciousness’, for the ‘fervour of their Italian hearts’.[64] The sight is indeed surprising and remarkable! What would be thought by him who, by the mouth of his apostle, declared: ‘There is neither Greek nor Jew nor barbarian, but Christ is in all things,’ if to-day he entered one of his churches and saw offered to the veneration of his faithful, a national heroine with a sword on her thigh and a flag in her hand?[65] This glorification of national particularisms, at least with the precision observable to-day, is undoubtedly something new in the history of the Church. It is not necessary to go back as far as Saint Augustine, who preached the extinction of all patriotisms in the embrace of ‘the City of God’; nor even to Bossuet, who shows us the indignation of Jesus at observing ‘that because we are separated by a few rivers or mountains, we seem to have forgotten that we are all of one nature’. So recently as 1849 a lofty assembly of prelates asserted that ‘this movement of nationalities is a relic of paganism, differences of language are a consequence of sin and the fall of man’. Certainly this declaration was an interested one, since it was provoked by the Most Catholic Francis Joseph to check the separatist tendencies among the peoples of his Empire; but I dare to assert that the Church would no longer make such a declaration, even for motives of interest. I shall be told that even if the Church wished to do so, she could only do it under penalty of delivering up her ministers to a terrible unpopularity among their respective peoples. As if the ‘clerk’s’ function were not to tell the laymen truths which are displeasing to them, and to pay the price at the expense of his own peace! I do not ask so much. Is there a single prelate in any pulpit of Europe who would now dare to pronounce: ‘The Christian is both a cosmopolitan and a patriot. These two qualities are not incompatible. The world indeed is one common fatherland, or, to speak in more Christian terms, one common exile.’ (Pastoral letter ‘On the pretended philosophy of modern infidels,’ by Le Franc de Pompignon, Bishop of Puy, 1763. The ‘infidels’ here are those who refuse the Church the right to be cosmopolitan.)