which the City of God is betrayed to the enemy by the clergy, who have lulled everyone to sleep, by telling their consciences that sin doesn't matter any more. You might as well expect an army to win, after you have deprived the men of the morale to believe that victory is possible. My experience in the law is that frequently it is morale that enables you to work out how to win.
But it does not end there. The man-in-the-pew, deprived of the power to act courageously, deprived of a shared consciousness with God, if he submits to the yoke of the clergy has his own consciousness dwarfed to the parochial level, and is crippled from serving the community in any capacity demanding a wider horizon, or sense of proportion. If he has a job, he is compelled to live out his life by secular standards; they are the only ones he knows. So the man's secular frame of mind is perpetuated, and in religious terms he is compelled to remain a miserable sinner. In short, the clergy condemn him to remain a miserable sinner, and then cast it in his teeth that he is one.
Two things, in my opinion, have helped to cut the clergy down to size, since the days of their overweening triumph, and the church too unfortunately; firstly the Profession of Arms, secondly the advent of Natural Science. The Profession of Arms seems to have been at its best and most successful when it has embodied the spirit of the brotherhood of man; From Alexander the Great who scorned to avoid the hardships of his men, through the Mongol mounted archers, through our own Horatio Nelson, to the present day. An actual brotherhood sweeps away the pretence, which the Church has always preached, but seldom practiced. Natural Science too, which in its early generations discovered the amazing works of an incredibly intelligent and benign creator, now seems to have been so successful in revealing the mysteries of the universe (although it may only have scratched the surface), that it casts a condescending light on those who have so few achievements to show for all their efforts.