In the years that followed, leading up to the war of liberation, Scharnhorst and Stein and others pursued more successfully the policy of reform; although after victory the Court tried with success to put back the clock. Nevertheless the purpose of reform, while it lasted, was to harness the loyalty of citizens by offering freedom and competence, in place of semi-slavery and incompetence. Our problems are different. In England today, it may be true that the State is disintegrating, and ministers of any government are faced more and more with forces which they cannot understand, still less control; but this is not due to lack of political reform. The willingness to reform is almost hysterical; but many reforms are useless, because they have never been thought through. Our problem is how to revive a public whose apathy stems from a cynical distrust of politicians, which is all too well grounded in truth. I may be wrong, and I may be naïve, but my view is that only a rediscovery of religion has much chance of success. If I am right, it is the clergy who stand in the way of reform; whereas in Prussia it was the Royal Court’s reluctance to see its prerogatives disappear.
There is an incompatibility between traditional Christianity and a competent life in the secular world. They are as incompatible as abject penitence without end, and an assured confidence in the world of affairs. They are as unlike as chalk and cheese. I am sure many lay-people will have been aware of this, and found their own solution for it; maybe millions, maybe hundreds of millions. But I have never heard a clergyman either from the pulpit or privately admit the problem exists, still less propose a solution. I can understand this; most clergymen are decent sincere people, but they cannot bring themselves to modify the Christianity of the Gospels. It is all they know of religion, apart from the routine of ordinary prayer. Reform undermines all they are used to; just as it threatened Courtly life in Prussia.
This incompatibility is well illustrated by an anecdote from Durham during the War. Large numbers of Royal Air Force cadets descended on the university for six-months courses. They all studied physics, presumably to learn to handle instruments with confidence, as they were training to become bomber pilots and navigators. They were under a Wing Commander, who was a man with a formidable integrity. One day, his adjutant, who was sympathetic to the truths of religion, was unwise enough to allow the cadets to be inspected by a suffragan bishop, on Palace Green. The Wing Commander was furious; “Here am I, teaching my young gentlemen to be assassins. I’m not having them inspected by that milksop!” A harsh but understandable “appreciation of the situation”.