It is a great mistake to think that the clergy have a monopoly in the spiritual world. The spiritual world is dominated by the professions, the law, medicine, the profession of arms, and their like, by natural science and ever increasingly by technology. These are the great spiritual disciplines nowadays. The clergy have been pushed into a tiny corner. Maybe it is one of the best and most delightful corners; maybe a sense of communion with Jesus is the greatest reward the human soul can experience in this world; or maybe that is a great fantasy and imagination, a day-dream without substance. But whatever the truth, it is only a corner, because the ordinary man has to do his job by secular standards.
In the conduct of legal cases, the clergy have no the useful advice to give, and can have none. It would, indeed, be surprising if they offered any. Military tactics has quite a lot to offer. Take, for example, the case of a man accused of pushing drugs; the evidence against him was from buyers, the wrecks of humanity, more likely to inspire horror than belief; but there was also evidence that he and his wife had entertained a man, who took drugs, for a time in their home. The evidence of the buyers would never have convicted anybody by itself; so the problem was how to use the hospitality. After listening to him give evidence in chief, it seemed to me that he was not a man who could tell a flamboyant story, true or false. He would play a straight bat to every accusation. So I asked him what his reaction was to the accusation that he was a supplier on an international scale, and he denied it. Similarly the accusations that he was a wholesaler, or a retailer. “So have you had any contact with the drug world”? His answer was, “No”. And in that answer he was caught. We covered other topics, and as I approached the subject of his hospitality, my opponent obligingly undertook to call his wife; so I did not ask him about it. His wife was easy; “Yes”, she said, “we had this friend, we both knew he took…