stoutfellow

I think I will review Figes' The Crimean War once I finish it, but one passage just brought me up short.

Figes, illustrating the role religious fervor played in the belligerence of all four major participants, quotes one Rev. T. D. Harford Battersby thus:

We thank thee, O God, that we are not as other nations are: unjust, covetous, oppressive, cruel; we are a religious people, we are a Bible-reading, church-going people, we send missionaries into all the earth.

Um. How could an Anglican cleric speak those words, evocative as they are of the Parable of the Pharisee and the Tax-Collector, without realizing that he's equating himself (and Britain) to the Pharisee? The mind boggles.