Note 72 — III The ‘Clerks’—The Great Betrayal

And even the teaching of Jesus Christ. R. Johannet says (op. cit., p. 153), ‘I have tried to show what a vast amount of Christianity is contained in the bourgeois type, when it is pure. To condemn the bourgeois, because he is a bourgeois, in the name of Christ, seems to me a somewhat daring paradox.’ But this author does not quote a single text of the Gospels. He only quotes a few interpreters of Saint Thomas Aquinas, whom he praises for their ‘extra-realist sense of affairs’, and who apparently for him incarnate the thinking of Jesus Christ. This work is one of the most perfect examples of the modern ‘clerk’s’ desire to idealize the practical spirit. (On the subject of Christian doctrine in the matter of property, see Father Thomassin, Traité de l’aumône.)