I find a preacher of the gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation, commonly called “nunc dimittis,” made on the first presentation of our Saviour in the Temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This “leading in triumph,” a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages entering into Onondaga after some of their murders called victories, and leading into hovels hung round with scalps their captives overpowered with the scoffs and buffets of women as ferocious as themselves, much more than it resembled the triumphal pomp of a civilized martial nation;—if a civilized nation, or any men who had a sense of generosity, were capable of a personal triumph over the fallen and afflicted.
This, my dear Sir, was not the triumph of France. I must believe, that, as a nation, it overwhelmed you with shame and horror. I must believe that the National Assembly find themselves in a state of the greatest humiliation in not being able to punish the authors of this triumph or the actors in it, and that they are in a situation in which any inquiry they may make upon the subject must be destitute even of the appearance of liberty or impartiality. The apology of that assembly is found in their situation; but when we approve what they must bear, it is in us the degenerate choice of a vitiated mind…
But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise, is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that charity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil by losing all its grossness! – Edmund Burke
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History affords us many examples of a historical events that produce widely divergent reactions according to the different faiths of those who view and/or participate in the event. The French Revolution was a classic case in point. Burke, the Christian European, reacted in horror to the French Revolution. And he maintained his abhorrence of “the horror, the horror” after the death of Robespierre. The mad-dog liberals in France, Britain, and the rest of Europe greeted the French Revolution with rapture; they looked on the execution of the King and Queen of France and the French aristocrats as a new dawning for mankind. The average European, the men and women in the pews, viewed Robespierre’s French Revolution with horror. It was the ‘regular’ Englishmen who burned down Priestly’s house, but the ‘regular’ Europeans did not maintain their abhorrence for Jacobinism after the death of Robespierre. They were easily lulled, by the European intelligentsia, into a sleepy acceptance of a more moderate Jacobinism, the type of Jacobinism embodied in the American experiment in democracy. And that same moderate Jacobinism has become the credo of the modern conservatives. This is something that we need to come to grips with. The democratic battles between conservatives and liberals are not battles between ideological opposites, they are battles within the confines of liberalism. Such battles can become quite bloody, just as the War of the Roses became quite bloody, but the battles are internecine.
The moderate liberals, in contrast to the mad-dog liberals, might praise Burke for his criticisms of the French Revolution in his Reflections, but they part company with him when he condemns the post-Robespierre Directory and the democratic spirit of the age in his greatest work – Letters on a Regicide Peace. Just as the cheese stands alone in the children’s song called “The Farmer Takes a Wife,” so did Edmund Burke stand alone in his repudiation of liberalism in all its guises, whether it was moderate conservatism or mad-dog Jacobinism. In order to take such a stand, Burke had to love his people enough to be rejected by them for his “extremism.” He had to follow the Man of Sorrows who was “despised and rejected of men.”
There are no political parties in the European world that represent white Christian Europeans. That is because the essence of Western democracy is a repudiation of European Christianity. In the U.S.A., the first of utopian nations, Trump is hated by the mad-dog liberals because he is not liberal enough. And he is often criticized by the moderate liberals for not adhering to their brand of moderate liberalism. But Trump is the very best the moderate liberals will ever get. Every republican candidate after Trump will be closer to the mad-dog liberals than Trump. The “conservatives” do not (because they are liberals themselves) understand that liberalism is from the devil. You can’t sup with the devil without eating poison. And if you play the democracy game, you are supping with the devil. Was the extermination of the white race ever put to a vote? And yet the white race is being exterminated. Was the legalization of abortion ever put to a vote? And yet millions of babies are being murdered every year. And was the enshrinement of the negro as the new Messiah of the Western world ever put to a vote? And yet the negro has become the state-sanctioned Messiah of the Western world. All this has come about because the people of Europe have traded their Christian heritage for a democratic bowl of poisonous lentils. Our precious freedoms of speech and worship are not freedoms if we are not free to speak of the one true God, the Christ of Europe, and if we are not free to worship that same God and denounce the heathen gods of the liberals.
The liberalism of the conservatives and the liberals was on full display this past Monday on the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The conservatives couldn’t praise him enough, and the mad-dog liberals used the occasion to call Trump, despite his fulsome praise of King, a racist for calling Haiti a sh- – hole. But of course it doesn’t matter what Trump does; the mad-dog liberals will always hate him, because he has refused to advance from moderate liberalism to mad-dog liberalism. Incidentally, I would not call Haiti a sh- – hole, I would call it a hellhole. It is a nation that has been consecrated to Satan ever since the time of the French Revolution. But then so is our nation, and the other European nations, consecrated to Satan; we dedicated our nations to the evil one when we refused to repudiate liberalism by defending European Christianity against the multi-racial, multi-religious Christianity of the liberals.
If we go through a work such as Russell Kirk’s The Conservative Mind or Henry Regnery’s autobiography in which he tells us of his life as a conservative publisher, we come away from those works with a rather disturbing view of 20th century conservativism. There is nothing in the works of the so-called conservatives about defending the European people from the colored heathen or about defending European Christianity. There is a lot written about the defense of democracy and the defense of intellectual Christianity (“our Greco-Roman, Christian tradition”), but there is no defense of the people who heard the word of God and took His word into their hearts. Conservatism cannot be grounded in the airy nothingness of ideas without a local habitation in the hearts of men. We can’t love universal ideas of family, home, and God. We must love flesh and blood people and a flesh and blood God.
Edward Gibbon, the author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, is often cited by the conservatives as one of their own. But what did Gibbon want to conserve? It certainly wasn’t European Christianity and the European people. He hated both with a passionate intensity. Gibbon’s grudge against Christianity was that it had replaced the pagan Greeks and Romans, whom Gibbon thought represented the pinnacle of human achievement. Gibbon’s views represent the views of many of the modern conservatives. They love the external organizations of the Greeks and the Romans, which they hope to imitate in order to impose some kind of order on a world that Christ and His followers made too complex.
But what if the human heart is more of a mystery than the Greco-Romans could possibly conceive of? (1) What if man is more than man, what if he is created in the image of God? The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that He thought too much of men; He should not have given them the freedom to choose God or the devil. They will always, the Grand Inquisitor maintained, go with an organized system that allows them to circumvent the cross. All of our lives here on earth are defined by how we view the cross of Christ. The men on the Titanic who went to their deaths singing “Nearer My God to Thee,” are my people. The rest, be they Gibbon conservatives or mad-dog liberals, are not my people; they belong to ‘this world only,’ a world without hope and without light.
Liberalism is grounded in a flight from the cross of Christ. Burke reacted with horror to the French Revolution because he saw the cross of Christ as the penultimate of beauty and truth. How could a man with a Christian heart not react with horror to the massacre of Christ’s people? But once the heart has turned from Christ, the destruction of Christ’s image in man becomes a source of glee to the Priestly’s and Price’s of Liberaldom. And the moderate Jacobins, the conservatives who love the pagan Greeks and Romans, will calmly ignore the massacre of Christ’s people. To his dying day, the great Roman Catholic conservative, Hilaire Belloc, defended the French Revolution.
The development of modern science helped the intellectual elites in church and state to spread their ‘flight from the cross’ theology to the masses. “Perhaps life is not a crucifixion if we turn to the new trinity of the abstracted intellect, the negro, and modern science.” That was the devilish temptation that ensnared the modern Europeans. Western democracy is a celebration of that new faith, a faith without the crucifixion of Christ. But without the crucifixion can there be a resurrection? What a falling off for the European people! If we don’t die with Christ we cannot live with Him in this world or the next – “It is a faithful saying: For if we be dead with Him, we shall also live with him: If we suffer, we shall also reign with Him: if we deny Him, He also will deny us.”(2 Timothy 2: 11-12)
Kurtz, in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, looks at the evil in his heart and judges it – “The Horror, the Horror.” Marlowe, without approving of Kurtz, does say it is something to have judged, to declare evil to be evil. Without becoming evil, we, the European people, are required to judge evil. In the name of the Christ who dwells in human hearts, we must identify the horror, and we must combat the horror. The most striking thing about the European resistance to liberalism is that there is no real resistance to liberalism. A Christian European would look at negro worship, legalized abortion, feminism, and the Islamification of Europe, and he would cry, “The horror, the horror!” Then he would take up arms against the perpetrators of the horror. But if our faith in Christ is not the “bred in the bone” faith of our European ancestors we do not have anything in our hearts that makes us respond to the evils of liberalism with a passionate “to the death” intensity. When the Moslems rape, mutilate, and murder the women of the West in order to uphold the honor of Islam, when the liberals order us to bow down to the sacred negro in order to do all honor and homage to their gods, and when the feminists command us to honor the femininity of Lady Macbeth, why do we not respond with our own code of honor? Have we forgotten what that code of honor consists of? Burke, echoing St. Paul, called the Christian European’s honor code “that charity of honor.” Only the antique Europeans, the condemned and despised, incorporated charity into their honor code instead of blood lust, vanity, and cruelty. If their honor code no longer has a place in human hearts, there will be no place for the Son of Man to lay His head.
This brave new world of the liberals is a very old world; it is the same world of darkness and death that the Son of God entered in order to give us light and life. Is there anything that the liberals can give us to make us reject His world of light and love for their world, which is devoid of His light and love? They, the liberals, take it as a given that their new world is paradise, compared to Christian Europe. And the church men have gone along with them. But some of us, we few, must stay with Christian Europe even if it means we shall be “despised and rejected of men.” There must be some who stand until they are relieved by their Lord and Master. +
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(1) It is truly amazing, and not in a good way, how many scholars and writers of the Christian era continued to hold up the pagan Greeks and Romans as the pinnacle of artistic and human excellence. Ben Jonson challenged that assumption in his tribute “To The Memory of My Beloved The Author, Mr. William Shakespeare”:
And though thou hadst small Latine and less Greeke,
From thence to honour thee, I would not seeke
For names; but call forth thund’ring Aeschilus,
Euripides and Sophocles to us;
Paccuuius, Accius, him of Cordoua dead,
To life again, to heare thy Buskin tread,
And shake a Stage; or, when thy Sockes were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison
Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughtie Rome
sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to showe,
To whom all Scenes of Europe homage owe.
He was not of an age but for all time!
The organizational gate of paganism might be wider and easier to work our way through, but the narrow gate, the way of the cross, leads us to Him:
I am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take to be too little for pomp to enter. Some that humble themselves may; but the many will be too chill and tender, and they’ll be for the flow’ry way that leads to the broad gate and the great fire.
-Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well