of my experience is that only once have I met anything approaching the ideal, and that was in the comradeship and discipline of a regiment. Anything the Church has provided has been second rate. She claims to have the key to life as it ought to be lived, but she does not put it into the lock, and turn it.
How limited the imagination of those in a corner to think they can rectify the position by accommodating themselves to contemporary fashion. How much worse to start preaching against science. Clausewitz has the answer for those who nowadays favour a return to credulity; “Even acts of faith”, he says, “should be intelligent acts of faith”. As is well known, he said that experience showed that luck is inseparable from war, and that it is impossible to plan in such detail as to eliminate luck. You have to try to plan so as to take advantage of good luck, if it comes your way; and try to plan so as not to be thrown off balance completely by bad luck. He summed it up by saying that even acts of faith should be intelligent acts of faith; a sentiment with which I heartily agree. I know quite well what would happen to me if the days of witch-hunts did return; I would end up in the torture chamber. And as I look about me in church, I sometimes wonder who else would be there, and in what capacity? Men themselves do not change, nor the heart's inclination towards evil. Indeed there is nothing new under the sun, except in the religious world Christ's resurrection and the hope of his second coming, and perhaps in the secular world the organisation of society, and the ideas that help mould that organisation.
Or could it be that an indwelling between people, outside the army, outside the constraints of discipline but inside the constraints of self-discipline, would introduce something new into human relations? It would be different, of course, from what you find in the army. But does one not catch sight of it rarely, in moments of tenderness and intimacy; but which never seem to last, and which slip away like the morning dew? Could it have been this that…