Moreover, the modern ‘clerks’ extol Christianity insofar as it is supposed to have been pre-eminently a school of practical, creative virtues, adjusted to the support of the great human institutions. This amazing deformation of a doctrine which in its precepts is so obviously devoted to the love of the spiritual alone, is not only taught by laymen, who are quite within their rights in trying to place their practical desires under the patronage of the highest moral authorities; it is also professed by the ministers of Jesus themselves. Pragmatist Christianity, as I mean it here, is preached to-day from all Christian pulpits.[112] This exhortation to concrete advantages and to that form of soul which procures them, is expressed by the modern ‘clerk’ in another very remarkable teaching: By praise of the military life and the feelings which go with it, and by contempt for civil life and the morality it implies. We know the doctrine preached in Europe during the past fifty years by its most esteemed moralists, their apology for war ‘which purifies’, their veneration for the man of arms ‘the archtype of moral beauty’, their proclamation of the supreme morality of ‘violence’ or of those who settle their differences by duels and not before a jury, while they declare that respect for contracts is the ‘weapon of the weak’, the need for justice the ‘characteristic of slaves’. It is not betraying the disciples of Nietzsche or Sorel--that is, the great majority of contemporary men of letters who attempt to set up a scale of moral values for the world--to say that according to them Colleoni is a far superior specimen of humanity to l’Hôpital. The estimates of the _Voyage du Condottiere_ are not peculiar to the author of that work. Here is an idealization of practical activity, which humanity had never before heard from its educators, at least from those who speak dogmatically. I shall be told that Nietzsche and his school do not extol the military life because it procures material advantages, but on the contrary, because it is the type of disinterested realism, and in opposition to the realism which in their opinion is the characteristic of civilian life. Yet it is none the less true that the way of life praised by these moralists is in fact that which pre-eminently brings material advantages. Whatever may be said by the author of _Reflections on Violence_ and his disciples, war is more profitable than the counting house; to take is more advantageous than to exchange; Colleoni possesses more than Franklin. (Naturally, I am speaking of the successful military man, since Nietzsche and Sorel never speak of the merchant who goes bankrupt.) Moreover, no one will deny that the irrational activities, of which the military instinct is only one aspect, are extolled by their great modern apostles for their practical value. Their historian has put it admirably: The Romanticism of Nietzsche, Sorel, and Bergson is a _utilitarian_ Romanticism.