systematic study of the past which enables ordinary soldiers to become competent staff-officers, without whom the control of large armies would be impossible. Soldiers themselves have not changed.
Nor is the position any different in the civilian world. We all think we are so clever because of the remarkable advances of science and technology; but it was the founding fathers of science who were the real geniuses, we are simply standing on the shoulders of others and developing their ideas. The number of new ideas is very few. Einstein, I believe, said he had only had two: the special and the general theory of relativity. There is only one in this book. It is the organisation of scientific knowledge, and its dissemination that enables the present extraordinary advances to be made, in a multitude of tiny steps.
It is the same in the Church. People do not change. Those today who feel a sense of vocation to enter the priesthood, will be very much the same sort of men who felt the vocation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; neither particularly good nor particularly bad men. Yet then, in comparatively civilised times, they used the Inquisition in Europe to torture and execute huge numbers of their fellow Christians, all in the name of conscience. It has frequently been said that if Christ himself had lived in those days, he too would probably have been condemned and sent to the stake, by the very people who were claiming to be upholding the religion which was in his name. It is no more extraordinary that the Church in the twentieth century should propose legislation for marriage without understanding the nature of marriage or recognising the presence of evil, than long ago that she should have send people to the stake for trivial non-conformity of conscience. Both errors could stem from the same inability to see things as they are, and from the same refusal to recognise evil.
There is nothing absolutely to prevent the clergy from resurrecting the Inquisition again. If the world were suddenly to have a long period of…