Faith & Spirit Quote by Duke of Wellington

Clever devils is the line’s masterstroke: it flatters the educated while poisoning the compliment. Wellington isn’t warning against ignorance; he’s warning against a kind of modernity that produces sharp minds unmoored from the moral architecture that, in his view, keeps society governable. The insult is strategic. “Devils” suggests not mere selfishness but active, intelligent subversion - people capable of using reason to rationalize cruelty, mock duty, or engineer social disorder.

The intent lands in the anxieties of post-revolutionary Europe. Wellington, the soldier-statesman who watched the French Revolution’s ideals curdle into terror and then empire, represents a ruling class spooked by the idea that education could become a solvent. Teach people to read, argue, calculate, and they can also read radical pamphlets, argue against hierarchy, and calculate how power works. Religion here functions less as private faith than as social technology: a shared set of constraints, an internal police force, a language of obligation. Strip it away and education becomes a weapon that can be turned upward.

The subtext is paternalistic but not stupid. It assumes that intelligence amplifies whatever values you already have; it doesn’t automatically improve them. In a Britain grappling with reform movements, expanding literacy, and rising secular currents, the line doubles as a conservative plea: if you’re going to sharpen the blade, keep it sheathed in tradition. It’s also a quiet admission of fear - not of the ignorant masses, but of the newly competent ones.