They stand ostentatiously aloof from the sordid competitions of worldly business. They have forsworn, or at any rate forgone, the ordinary prizes of wealth and position. And for these very reasons they are ill equipped for guiding practical affairs. Their abstinences are fatal impediments, and render them apt to leave human nature out of their reckoning. They are wanting in experience of the difficulties which beset ordinary men, and of the motives which influence them. Knowing less of such matters (for all their book learning) than any other class of articulately-speaking men, they find it by so much the easier to lay down rules and regulations for the government of the world.
To a priesthood, whether ecclesiastical or academic, problems of politics and war present themselves for consideration in an engaging simplicity. They evolve theories of how people live, of how they ought to live; and both sets of theories are mainly cobwebs. There is no place in their philosophy for anything which is illogical or untidy. Ideas of compromise and give-and-take, are abominations in priestly eyes—at any rate when they are engaged in contemplation of worldly affairs. And seeing that the priesthood aspires, nevertheless, to govern and direct a world which is illogical and needs humouring, there is nothing wonderful, if when it has achieved power, it should blunder on disaster in the name of principle, and incite men to cruelties in the name of humanity. 'Clericalism,' said a French statesman, and English statesmen have echoed his words—'Clericalism is the enemy.' And this is right, whether the priesthood be that of Rome or John Calvin, of economic professors expounding Adam Smith in the interests of Manchester, or history professors improving upon Treitschke in the interests of the Hohenzollern dynasty.
PRIESTS AND LAWYERS
Priests and professors when they meddle in politics are always the same. They sit in their studies or cells, inventing fundamental principles; building thereon great edifices of reasoned or sentimental brickwork which splits in the sun and crumbles in the storm. Throughout the ages, as often as they have left their proper sphere, they have been subject to the same angry enthusiasms and savage obstinacies. Their errors of judgment have been comparable only to their arrogance. Acts of cruelty and treachery, meanness and dishonour,[[3]] which would revolt the ordinary German or Englishman, commend themselves readily, on grounds of sophistry or logic, to these morbid ascetics, so soon as they begin busying themselves with the direction of public affairs.
It would be unfair to judge any country by its political professors. At the same time, if any country is so foolish as to follow such guides, there is a probability of mischief in national—still more in international—affairs. For they are as innocent as the lawyers themselves, of any knowledge of the real insides of things. They differ of course from the lawyers in many ways. They are ever for making changes for the sake of symmetry; while the man of law is for keeping as he is until the last moment; or at any rate until it is clearly his interest to budge. A priesthood has a burning faith in its own hand-wrought idols; the lawyer on the contrary, does not go readily to the stake, does not catch fire easily, being rather of the nature of asbestos. When lawyers monopolise political power—even when they merely preponderate, as of late years they have seemed to do more and more in all democratic countries, whether of the monarchical or republican type—they invariably destroy by insensible gradations that which is most worth preserving in man or state, the soul. But they do not bring on sudden catastrophe as a priesthood does; their method is to strangle slowly like ivy.
In England, nowadays—indeed ever since the 'eighties, when professors of Political Economy became discredited as political guides—there are not many evidences of priestly influence. Certainly there is nothing of an organised kind. What exists is erratic and incalculable. There is much clamour; but it is contradictory, spasmodic, and inconstant, without any serious pretence, either of learning or science, to support it. Each of our prophets is in business for himself. There is no tinge of Erastianism about any of them. For the most part they are the grotesques and lions comiques of the world of letters, who prophesy standing on their heads, or grinning through horse-collars, and mistaking always "the twinkling of their own sophisticated minds for wisdom."
Alliance between a priesthood and a bureaucracy tends gradually to produce, as in the case of China, an oppressive uniformity—not unlike that aimed at by the more advanced socialists—where every fresh innovation is a restriction hampering the natural bent. On the other hand an alliance between a priesthood and a military caste—especially when the bureaucracy is ready to act in sympathy—is one of the commonest causes of international convulsions.
PRIESTS AND SOLDIERS