Note 123 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal (continued 2)

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.’