time: the refreshing river 



"The clerk can only be strong," says Benda, "if he is fully conscious 

 of his nature and his function, and if he shows us that he is conscious 

 of it, that is to say, if he declares to us that his kingdom is not of this 

 world. This absence of practical value is precisely what gives greatness 

 to his teaching. As for the prosperity of the kingdoms of this world, 

 that belongs to the ethic of Caesar, and not to his ethic. And with 

 this position the clerk is crucified, but he has won the respect of men 

 and they are haunted by his words." Yet if one of Julien Benda's 

 mediaeval clerks were placed in our modern world, would he not 

 denounce the fantastic system of economics under which we live; 

 would he not criticise the laws which cause food to be destroyed 

 because people are too poor to buy it? It is well that Benda castigates 

 the modern clerk for lending the weapons of his intellect to nationalism, 

 but there are other forces than nationalism at work in the political 

 world to-day. He can, of course, remain inactive, adopting the position 

 of absolute neutrality laid down by Benda, and urged, as we have 

 seen, by distinguished representatives of science, refusing to take 

 part in the political and social struggle, and finally perishing, like an 

 Archimedes, at his laboratory bench during a war. But what differ- 

 entiates the position of the modern from the mediaeval clerk is that, 

 if he was to be active, the latter had no choice in his allegiance, while 

 the former has a choice, and must make it. Thus there are two ways 

 open to the scientific worker at the present time. All the backward 

 pull of respectability and tradition urges him to throw in his lot with 

 the existing capitalist order, with its corollaries of nationalism, im- 

 perialism, militarism, and, ultimately, fascism. On the other hand, he 

 can adopt the ideals of social justice and of the classless State; he can 

 recognise that his own best interests lie with the triumph of the 

 working-class, the only class pledged to abolish classes; in a word, 

 he can think of the Kingdom literally and can work for its realisation. 

 A Kingdom not of this world, but to be in this world. 



The transcendent truth of the mediaeval Church was bound up 

 with a definite economic order, feudalism; and it was capitalism, of 

 course, as it gradually developed, which upset this economic order, 

 and science which superseded this transcendent truth. The geographical 

 discoveries, which made the European home begin to seem a prison; 

 the astronomical discoveries, which made the earth as a whole, pre- 

 viously the scene of the drama of redemption, shrink to one among a 

 vast number of celestial bodies; the mechanical discoveries which 

 opened up the possibility of industrialism; all undermined the strength 



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