After death the fate of the soul was sealed, and the man
once dead, the "lifeless clay" (as the journalist put it--and the Middle
Ages was the only source from which he got the idea of clay at all),
whether it were that of a Pope or of some random highwayman, had no
effect whatsoever upon the fate of the soul. The greatest saint might
have offered the most solemn sacrifice on its behalf for years, and if
the soul were damned his sacrifice would have been of no avail.
I have taken this example absolutely at random. But the modern reader,
apart from sentences as clearly provocative of criticism as this, is
perpetually coming across references, allusions, and parallels which
take a certain course of human European and English history for granted.
How is he to distinguish when that course is rightly drawn from when it
is wrongly drawn?
Thus in some newspaper article written by an able man, and dealing, let
us say, with the territorial army, one might come across a sentence like
this: "Napoleon himself used troops so raw that they were actually
drilled on the march to the battlefield." That would be a perfectly true
statement. Any amount of criticism of it lies in connexion with Mr.
Haldane's scheme, but still it is a true piece of history. Napoleon did
get raw recruits into his battalions just before any one of his famous
marches began, and drill them on the way to victory.
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