By this I mean the ‘clerk’s’ determination to put forth his principles as valid in the practical order of things, as reconcilable with the safeguarding of the sword’s conquests. This determination, which has affected the Church for twenty centuries and almost all the idealists (give me the names of those since Jesus who have declared themselves incompetent in the practical order of things), is the source of all the ‘clerk’s failures’. It may be said that the ‘clerk’s’ defeat begins from the very moment when he claims to be practical. As soon as the ‘clerk’ claims that he does not disregard the interests of the nation or of the established classes, he is inevitably beaten, for the very good reason that it is impossible to preach the spiritual and the universal without undermining the institutions whose foundations are the possession of the material and the desire to feel distinct from others. A true ‘clerk’ (Renan) says excellently: ‘The mother-country is a worldly thing; the man who wants to play the angel will always be a bad patriot.’ Thus we see that the ‘clerk’ who claims to secure the works of the world has a choice between two consequences. Either he secures them and transgresses all his principles, which is the case with the Church supporting the nation and property; or he maintains his principles and causes the ruin of the institutions he claimed he was supporting, which is the case with the humanitarian who claims to safeguard what is national. In the first case the ‘clerk’ is despised by the just man, who denounces him as cunning and strikes him out of the rank of ‘clerk’; and in the second case he collapses under the hooting of the nations who call him inefficient, while he provokes a violent and loudly acclaimed reaction on the part of the realist, which is what is now happening in Italy. From all this it follows that the ‘clerk’ is only strong if he is clearly conscious of his essential qualities and his true function, and shows mankind that he is clearly conscious of them. In other words he declares to them that his kingdom is not of this world, that _the grandeur of his teaching lies precisely in this absence of practical value, and that the right morality for the prosperity of the kingdoms which are of this world, is not his, but Caesar’s_. When he takes up this position, the ‘clerk’ is crucified, but he is respected, and his words haunt the memory of mankind.[168] The need to remind the modern ‘clerks’ of these truths (for everyone of them is angry at being called Utopian) is one of the most suggestive observations in connection with our subject. It shows that the desire to be practical has become general, that the claim to be so has now become necessary in order to obtain an audience, and that the very notion of ‘clerkdom’ has become obscured even in those who still tend to exercise that function.