A Mystery

But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom, which God ordained before the world unto our glory: – I Corinthians 2: 7

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For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fulness. – Tom Brown’s School Days

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St. Paul enjoins us to believe in Christ’s mysterious, divine charity: “Behold I shew you a mystery: we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.”

It was the devil’s self-appointed task to destroy, through his liberal minions, the Europeans’ faith in Jesus Christ by attacking that mystery which St. Paul writes about and Handel put to music. Truth, the liberals tell us, cannot be mysterious, it must be rational and scientifically verifiable or it is not truth. Where is the scientific evidence that Christ rose from the dead? And where is the scientific evidence that those men and women of old Europe who believed that Christ rose from the dead are with the Lord, body and soul, even though they are dead and buried? There is no scientific evidence to support the major tenets of the Christian faith, nor is there a rational explanation for the Trinity, the virgin birth, original sin, or the creation of man from the dust of the earth and the creation of woman from the rib of man. So isn’t it time to leave the age of credulity and enter the new age of science and reason? “Yes, it is time to leave the age of credulity,” the liberals tell us. “That is why we have taken the reins of government in church and state.” One thinks of the prophetic words of Isaiah: “And the government shall be upon His shoulders.” Yes, the government should be upon His shoulders, not the liberals’ shoulders. But before we leave the credulous antique Europeans behind, let us look at the new mystery religion that has replaced Christianity.

The gods of the pagan Greeks succumbed to rationalism, and as a result the Greeks succumbed to the Romans. But the Roman gods were mere state gods, they no longer had any mystery. The mystery religions replaced them in the hearts of the people. Christ did not conquer the mystery religions because His story was rational and scientific, He conquered the mystery religions because His incarnation, crucifixion, and resurrection from the dead was a greater mystery than that of the mystery religions. (1) The pagan Greeks and Romans watched their civilizations die because they failed to realize that rationalism kills mystery and without mystery there can be no faith. And what happens to a people without faith? They die out as a people.

St. Augustine quite naturally thought the coming of the ‘barbarian’ hordes, the European tribesmen, meant the end of civilization. He wanted to give the faithful something to hold on to, so he invented a false concept of the Church. The Roman organization became, in Augustine’s mind, the true Church. Everything outside of that Church was the city of man, which was evil. Catholic and Protestant theologians have differed on many things, but they all have remained under the spell of St. Augustine regarding the church of Christ. They do not believe that the Word of God is passed on from heart to heart; they believe it must be passed on through mind-forged organizations consisting of smart men who hammer out creeds and special bulletins about God and then pass their findings on to the faithful. And the main purpose of those creeds and bulletins is to destroy the mystery of Christ crucified, Christ risen so that their rational formulations of the essence of Christianity can take center stage. It is not a question of St. Augustine or Aquinas. Nor is it a question of Aquinas or Calvin. It is a question of St. Paul and the circumcised heart versus the mind-forged theories of theological experts who thought, and still think, that Christ can be put in a scientized box and played upon as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sought to play upon Hamlet.

HAMLET. I do not well understand that. Will you play upon this pipe?

GUILDENSTERN. My lord, I cannot.

HAMLET. I pray you.

GUILDENSTERN. Believe me, I cannot.

HAMLET. I do beseech you.

GUILDENSTERN. I know no touch of it, my lord.

HAMLET. ’Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent music. Look you, these are the stops.

GUILDENSTERN. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony. I have not the skill.

HAMLET. Why, look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me! You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass; and there is much music, excellent voice, in this little organ, yet cannot you make it speak. ’Sblood, do you think I am easier to be play’d on than a pipe? Call me what instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

The conquest of Rome by the European tribesmen was providential, because the Europeans, when they bent their knees to Christ, did not bend their knees to the Roman system. Why should they bend their knees to a system they had defeated? They bent their knees to a God whose heart was greater than the heart of Odin:

The Nordic religion was not a religion of dread, or of magic formularies to propitiate hostile powers. Instead of covering its temples with frescoes of the tortures of the damned, it taught people not to be afraid of death. Its ideal was the fellowship of the hero with the gods, not merely in feasting and victory, but in danger and defeat. For the gods, too, are in the hands of fate, and the Scandinavian vision of the twilight of the gods that was to end the world showed the heroes dying valiantly in the last hopeless fight against the forces of chaos—loyal and fearless to the last. It is an incomplete but not an ignoble religion. It contains those elements of character which it was the special mission of the Nordic peoples to add to modern civilization and to Christianity itself.

—History of England by G. M. Trevelyan

The central conflict throughout the Christian centuries of Europe has been between the churchmen, the intellectual Christians who wanted to turn the mystery religion of Christ crucified, Christ risen into a scientized philosophy, and the European people who loved much and wanted to hold on to the Christ of St. Paul and the Apostles. The conflict finally ended in favor of the churchmen when the preponderance of scientific facts, and the alliance of the churchmen with the liberal proponents of scientific facts, convinced the European people to give up on the Christ of the Gospels and St. Paul.

It seems too obvious to have to be stated, but that has been Satan’s goal all along – to obscure the obvious Gospel truth that Christ comes to us through the heart, in order to make us believe that we cannot know God unless we find the right ‘system.’ The great system never comes – it is always in the future, a future that can only be realized if we repudiate the past where Christ dwells with our people. In the meantime, we still need a religion. That is where the liberals step in. They kept debunking the Christ story because it was a mystery that defied science and reason, while they handed mankind a new mystery religion that was just as irrational and unscientific as the religion they rejected.

The centerpiece of the liberals’ new religion is the noble black savage. Feminism, legalized abortion, legalized sodomy, transgenderism and every other evil under the sun are part of the liberals’ mystery religion, but the various parts of their religion are held together by the worship of the sacred negro. Just as Christ is the cornerstone of the Christian faith, so is the negro the cornerstone of the liberals’ faith. While the churchmen have taken great pains to divest Christianity of its mysterious, irrational elements, thus destroying the faith, they have also taken great pains to embrace the mystery of liberalism, which is the mystery of the noble black savage. How can men who do what blacks do – rape, murder, and pillage – be sacred entities? And how can we, mortal men who must die, expect to be saved from death by the worship of the noble black savage? “Ah, that is the great mystery of our faith,” the liberals tell us in rapturous ecstasy. But must we submit to the liberals’ mystery religion?

If a man believes that this world is all there is, he will embrace the liberals’ new mystery religion, because it is the religion of the powers that be. And if a man wants to have success in this world and keep open a possibility of some position in the next world, which may or may not exist, he will embrace organized Christian Jewry, which combines the worship of the negro with a cookie-cutter Christianity. But what if a man loves and hates with the same passion as the ancient Europeans, the men who left Odin for Christ? Such a man will not bend his knee to the liberals’ mystic negro, nor will he compromise with the Christian philosophers. He will have all or nothing: he will have the Christ story with all its mystery, all its tragedy, and all its triumph.

“Why should you not explain the mystery of God in logical, rational terms? Are you afraid that your faith cannot stand up to reason?” Such is the refrain of the great rationalists throughout the Christian centuries of Europe – the Shaws, the Russells, and the Voltaires. And the theologians have taken the bait. They approached God with slide-rules and dissecting kits in order to pluck out His mystery. Is that how we know the living God? Christ called a little child unto him and said, “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the Kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.” It is the poetic of our people to which we must cling, their childlike trust in His promise that we need not fear the world because He has overcome the world. Christ did not try to explain the tragedy of life away, instead He drew us to His sacred heart so that we would be able to see our redemption in His sacrifice on the cross. The antique Europeans understood the mystery of Christ crucified, Christ risen, because they, like unto a child, understood the Christ story with their hearts rather than with their rational, empirical minds.

We cannot approach God in the spirit of internet trolls and expect to see the Kingdom of Heaven. There is more wisdom in Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses than in all the theological tomes ever written. Why? Because there is a reverence for the mystery of a Christian hearth fire in those poems of Stevenson’s childhood. Without that reverence, we will surely die out as a people, and we will not, as individuals, have any contact with the living God. The mark of a man is not that he kneels to no-one. The mark of a man is determined by whom he kneels to. Our people once knelt in “humble adoration” to Christ. If that seems foolish to the philosophical trolls and is a stumbling block to the Jews and the neo-pagans, then so be it. We will cleave unto Him, because the mystery of His loving charity is the mystery that speaks to our hearts:

THE UNSEEN PLAYMATE

When children are playing alone on the green,
In comes the playmate that never was seen.
When children are happy and lonely and good,
The Friend of the Children comes out of the wood.

Nobody heard him and nobody saw,
His is a picture you never could draw,
But he’s sure to be present, abroad or at home,
When children are happy and playing alone.

He lies in the laurels, he runs on the grass,
He sings when you tinkle the musical glass;
Whene’er you are happy and cannot tell why,
The Friend of the Children is sure to be by!

He loves to be little, he hates to be big,
‘Tis he that inhabits the caves that you dig;
‘Tis he when you play with your soldiers of tin
That sides with the Frenchmen and never can win.

‘Tis he, when at night you go off to your bed,
Bids you go to your sleep and not trouble your head;
For wherever they’re lying, in cupboard or shelf,
‘Tis he will take care of your playthings himself. +

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(1) If the Christian rationalists would leave the stage and let Christ’s Gospel stand alone against the liberals’ mystery religion, Christ would triumph once again. It is our duty to see that the Christian rationalists cease their intellectual warbling and listen to the forgotten voice of the ancient European people who understood the mystery of Christ crucified, Christ risen, because they saw life “feelingly.”