One of the gravest dangers of the present political system in this country is the acceptance of expediency as the guiding principle of legislation. Moral principles have no longer any practical influence in government. The disadvantages of employing ecclesiastics in high offices in the Government, always greatly exaggerated, had the important counter-balancing advantage of the recognition of moral principles in legislation.

Political ecclesiastics might be corrupt, though there is no historical evidence to show that they were more corrupt than the modern lawyer-politician, business-politician, or demagogue-politician. It would be difficult to show that Holy Orders, per se, are more demoralising than the verbal subtleties of the Statute Book, stock and share broking (or pushing), or even a righteous indignation at the sweating of the working classes.

A statesman or politician in Holy Orders (to-day this suggests the Devil in Holy Water) must, at the worst, make some show of informing with moral principles his public acts and those for which he is officially responsible. He has some acquaintance with moral principles drawn from the Christian code, which is the code permeating our culture and civilisation and therefore not foreign to the minds and consciences of the people. The lawyer, business man or demagogue may be quite ignorant of Christian moral principles, except in so far as he has to adapt himself to the effect of them on his fellows. He may deliberately discard such principles and only permit them to influence his actions as necessary but regrettable expedients.

On the 19th of February, 1431, when St. Joan had lain near three months in the dungeon of Rouen Castle and the preliminaries for her trial were already completed, Bishop Cauchon summoned the Dominican Jean Lemaitre, Vice-Inquisitor of Rouen, to become his fellow in judging the Maid.

In dismay, evidently realising the irregularity of the whole proceeding, the Vice-Inquisitor takes refuge in a technicality: the trial, though held in Rouen, is considered as taking place in Cauchon’s diocese of Beauvais, whereas his own jurisdiction comprises Rouen only.

Thereupon Cauchon has recourse to the Inquisitor, Lemaitre’s superior, then absent. ‘I pray your Venerable Paternity,’ he writes, ‘summoning and requiring ... that you should come immediately to this town ... Or if you are detained by business so important as to give a real excuse for delay, please at least delegate Brother Jean Lemaitre in your stead . . . .’

Such language argues considerable coercive power. The Inquisitor seems to jump at the plea of other business, but from the 13th of March the Vice-Inquisitor Lemaitre must take his place at Cauchon’s side— though such tardy participation should have been sufficient to invalidate the whole trial.

‘He was forced to come in,’ Nicholas de Houppeville would testify thereafter, ‘he was a prey to great fears. I saw him greatly perplexed and perturbed during the case.’ Lemaitre’s conscience must have sometimes troubled him, for it was he himself who told Houppeville that Joan had complained of the brutality of her gaolers—a brutality it was his own duty to prevent, or rather, to render impossible by removing her to an ecclesiastical prison.

Conscience is a fact of common experience. It will be universally recognised that there is within the human consciousness some principle, some norm or measure, apparently unbiassed and involuntary, which seems to claim authority in regulating or attempting to regulate what is known as moral conduct. In other words, there is something of the Jekyll and Hyde in every man, and broadly speaking Jekyll is the personification of the voice of Conscience. But while there is universal recognition of the fact, there is less unanimity as to the precise significance of the fact of conscience. In a broad division there are two opposite views, in one of which conscience appears as rational, in the other as emotional. The latter is the view adopted by modern experimental psychologists in their attempt to analyse ‘moral consciousness.’

‘Moral consciousness’ is the somewhat undefined name given nowadays to the complexity of emotions and instincts which precede, accompany and follow a moral act, producing feelings of ‘moral’ satisfaction or disquietude as the case may be. Upon examination, however, it is found that all these emotions and instincts are placed in the order of bodily reactions to stimuli. They are confined, in other words, almost entirely to the material order, and in effect the highest and especially human faculties, namely reason and rational will, are disregarded or eliminated. This position, it should be noted, is justified by the circumstances in the sense that it represents the findings of purely experimental psychology. No one should be so foolish as to deny the authority of any science within its own sphere. It is only when any science presumes to argue to conclusions outside its own sphere that it lays itself open to criticism from without.

In the sunlit evening I saw a little railway which led out of Tunis on the north: a railway which looked too young and small to be able to go very far, but which would be almost certain to go to some enchanted place. And sure enough, when I asked for a ticket as far as possible I was given a ticket for Tunis: the train was of the kind that does a magic circle. It started, and at once it seemed to run into heaven without further delay; the town vanished and the sky lay under us as well as over us, luminous and blue and flecked with rosy clouds. After the first airy vision this undersky turned out tobeawide shallow lake stretching away to the eastward, with flocks of rosy flamingoes standing motionless in the blue water. They stood there like the clouds of sunset, perfectly still, and entirely happy, wrapped up in some lovely dream of their own.

On the other side of the lake was a hill of bare red earth crowned by a big white mosque. The train left the lake and in a little while came to the southernmost point of the promontory, where the green waves of the Mediterranean broke on the sand; then it began to turn on its circle and came to a place called Ste. Monique, where cherry trees in snow-white bloom fluttered everywhere against the red earth of the hills. Behind them a cliff-head rose above the sea, with a white Arab village crowded upon its crest. Then the train stopped on a hillside among a few villas and cornfields, and the station placard said in huge white letters, CARTHAGE. The letters needed to be huge and white, as if to emphasise a truth very difficult to believe. It simply did not seem possible.

‘When Colin March, a younger son of the famous diplomatist, played in a British Embassy garden abroad, his foreign nurse gave him a tortoise. “A useful beast,” she explained, “it devours cockroaches; they are its passion.” Colin wanted to see this beneficent passion at work. So he captured one of the Embassy’s many cockroaches and put it down in front of the tortoise’s nose, like an early Christian presented to a lion. The tortoise eyed the offered feast, and mused deeply. The cockroach did not muse. It was a cockroach of action. Without any apparent need for reflection it bolted for cover, like a flash of blackness, right into the tortoise’s shell, and hid itself in that profounder thinker’s armpit.

‘The cadet of a dynasty of ambassadors was charmed with the cockroach’s wit. He filed the whole affair in a pigeon-hole of his ‘cute little mind. As he grew up, he would often chuckle to think of it. Piquant parallels would occur to him. For a fox to go to earth under the kennels, for landsmen to put to sea to escape from a press-gang, for cannon-fodder to hide at the back of the cannon—this was the wisdom of life put into a kind of practical epigram, salt and impudent.’