A kind providence has placed in our breasts a hatred of the unjust and cruel, in order that we may preserve ourselves from cruelty and injustice. They who bear cruelty, are accomplices in it. The pretended gentleness which excludes that charitable rancor, produces an indifference which is half an approbation. They never will love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate…
That the Christian Religion cannot exist in this country with such a fraternity, will not, I think, be disputed with me. On that religion, according to our mode, all our laws and institutions stand as upon their base. That scheme is supposed in every transaction of life; and if that were done away, everything else, as in France, must be changed along with it. Thus religion perishing, and with it this constitution, it is a matter of endless meditation what order of things would follow it. But what disorder would fill the space between the present and that which is to come, in the gross, is no matter of doubtful conjecture.
-Edmund Burke, Letters on a Regicide Peace
The age of prophesy ended with John the Baptist, who stood in the long line of prophets that foretold the coming of the Lord. Once our Lord entered history, the age of prophesy was over. But there was a second tier of prophets, men of Christian Europe who told us what would happen if we abandoned the Christ of whom the prophets spoke. Foremost among those prophets was Edmund Burke. Burke, right from the beginning of the French Revolution, saw that the French Revolution was not a mere regime change; it was not an attempt by one faction of Monarchists to place a different monarch on the throne. The revolution represented an attempt to replace the Christian faith as the rule of law in order to facilitate the rule of Satan. Because of Robespierre’s maniacal consistency in that he did not attempt to dethrone Christ incrementally but all at once, Burke’s criticism of Robespierre was eventually accepted by the bulk of the European people, minus the liberals in his own party. But his criticisms of the anti-Christian nature of the underlying satanic ethos of the French Revolution – liberty, equality, and fraternity – did not have any effect on the European people. Once Robespierre disappeared from the scene, the Europeans embraced the American experiment in Jacobinism, which was and is an incremental implementation of the rule of Satan over the rule of Christ. Every single member of the new French Directory that deposed Robespierre had signed the death warrant of Louis XVI, and every single European nation that went democratic signed on to the death of Christian Europe. Prior to the American and French revolutions, the moral basis of the European governments was Christian; after those two revolutions the moral basis of the European governments was satanic.
Such an assertion, that the age of democracy ushered in the reign of Satan, seems outrageous because Satan did not immediately rear his head in the democratic nations of the West. But that is because of what Burke called “the unbought grace of life.” The ruling ethos of the democratic governments was based on the assumption that “Christ be not risen,” but the Europeans still largely adhered, until the 1960s, to the ethical code that came from a belief that “Christ is risen.” We now, in the 21st century, can see Satanism undiluted now that the unbought grace of life has been spent. There is no Christian ethos at work in the European nations because the belief that Christ be not risen has taken hold throughout the European nations. Dostoyevsky, who was a prophet as Burke was, has been answered. He posed the question, “Can an intelligent man, a European, believe in the divinity of Christ?” The reply of the “intelligent” Europeans is, “No.”
The European people have yet to come to terms, as Burke and Dostoyevsky did, with liberalism. Burke stated flatly that liberalism was from the devil: “The first liberal was the devil.” And Dostoyevsky, about 80 years later, echoed Burke in his novel The Devils, in which he warned the West about the satanic nature of the Bolsheviks. Most classical liberals, who are falsely labeled ‘conservatives,’ accept Burke’s criticism of the Robespierre Jacobins, but they fail to understand his warning that the democratic ‘ideals’ of the Jacobins, whether they were Robespierre Jacobins or incremental Jacobins, represented a flight from Christ in order to build a new European society based on the Satanic principles of the thing called liberalism.
All that was good in the democratic nations of Europe came from that remnant of grace left over from the Christian religion, which was confined to the private realm in the age of democracy. Tragically the European people mistakenly believed that democracy and science were responsible for what was good in their nations. Countries such as Denmark and Sweden seemed like paradises in the 1950s and early 1960s. They had avoided the capitalist excesses of the United States and the socialist excesses of the Soviet Union. But what happened to those nations when they spent the unbought grace of life? They lost their sense of pietas; they no longer loved their own in and through Christ, so they succumbed to the moral rot from within that accompanies sexual Babylon and the barbarian assault from without that is visited upon a people who have no faith. The incremental Jacobinism of the United States and the post-Robespierre Jacobinism of France became the ruling principle of the non-communist nations of Europe, and as a result they have all become satanic nations that worship the noble savage. The formerly communist nations of Europe, which now appear like paradises compared to the older democracies, will become like unto the Western democracies if they do not repudiate incremental Jacobin democracy. Listen to our prophets, men such as Burke and Dostoyevsky, men who had the prophetic fire of Isaiah and Jeremiah. They told us that there can never be a Christian democracy. The ethos of “Give us Barabbas!” can never be allowed to rule over our faith in the Man of Sorrows.
When Christ joined the two apostles on the road to Emmaus and heard of their sadness at His death, He gently upbraided them for their lack of faith: “Then he said unto them, ‘O fools, and slow of heart to believe all that the prophets have spoken. Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?’ And beginning at Moses and at the prophets he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.” Christ enjoins the apostles to do what St. Paul, after his conversion, enjoins us to do: search the scriptures with our hearts. The Catholic scholastics and then the Protestant scholastics who followed in their train, maintained a scholastic equivalent of “Dueling Banjos”: they sought to avoid the pitfalls of the passionate heart by appealing to reason. But reason, devoid of the passion of the heart, always becomes the servant of Satan. We can certainly fall from grace through misplaced passion, but we most certainly will fall from grace, as Adam and Eve fell from grace, if we make reason, divorced from the heart that loves, our sovereign Lord.
Strong passion under the direction of a feeble reason feeds a low fever, which serves only to destroy the body that entertains it. But vehement passion does not always indicate an infirm judgment. It often accompanies, and actuates, and is even auxiliary to a powerful understanding; and when they both conspire and act harmoniously, their force is great to destroy disorder within, and to repel injury from abroad. –Letters on a Regicide Peace
The unbought grace of life must be defended by hearts on fire with that charity of honor that motivated the prophets, St. Paul, and the European people when they were a people and not a democratic herd of cattle. The wars within Christendom were horrible, tragic affairs. Men, even Christian men, are not angels, but the evil effects of wars between Christians were mitigated by the European people’s faith in Christ. The wars of liberalism have been so much worse than the wars between Christians ever were for the reason that there is no mercy in the liberals. A Christian will extend mercy to his enemy because he feels that he too is a sinner, but the liberal will not extend mercy to his enemy because the liberal does not believe in the beginning of the Christ story. He does not believe that liberals are the sons and daughters of Adam and Eve whose humanity is tainted with original sin.
The Southern people of the United States were the defenders of Christian civilization in the northern hemisphere during the American Civil War, yet they were forced to accept a Carthaginian peace, a peace without mercy, at the close of the war. Why? Because the Jacobin leadership of the North did not see themselves as men in need of Christ’s mercy. They, like Shylock, demanded their pound of flesh, for they believed themselves to be without sin: “What judgement shall I dread doing no wrong?” The liberals believe that all sin rests with their enemies. That is why the country least responsible for World War I, Germany, was forced to pay war guilt money to the nations that entered the war on the side of the assassins. The liberals of America, France, Britain, and Russia had no mercy on their enemy. Why should they have mercy? They were without sin and their enemy was the embodiment of evil. In World War II the liberal dynamic was at work again. This time Germany was equally at fault, but why did the Western powers side with the Communists? They sided with the Communists because communism and democracy both stem from the same Jacobin roots. Communism is Robespierre Jacobinism and modern democracy is incremental Jacobinism. Lincoln, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, FDR, and Stalin were one in their Jacobinism and one in their rejection of Christian Europe.
Melville asks the question in his poem Clarel, a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land, “Wherefore ripen us unto pain?” The spiritual life is painful. If we love deeply the death of our loved ones and the contemplation of our own death is unbearable unless we believe that Christ is who He said He was. But if there is no faith in Christ, how does a person face that terror of terrors? The liberals’ solution is to avoid the depths. They have created a whole civilization – I call it an anti-civilization – based on an avoidance of the spiritual realm of existence. They must emphasize, in church, academy, and government, the material realm and only the material realm of existence lest they come into contact with the spiritual depths of life. Then they would have to face the horror of horrors without any spiritual armor. Science, and its attendant religion, Negro worship, is not a faith that can sustain us in the face of death. Science offers us an anesthetized passage from life to nothingness, and the liberals’ materially based religion helps us to be eased with our nothingness in this world by blotting out the image of God in man.
The liberals’ hatred beyond hatred for Trump can only be understood through the eyes of a Christian European. Then we can see that Trump has transgressed against the basic tenet of liberalism: that incremental Jacobinism must always move forward. What was acceptable ten or twenty years ago within the confines of liberalism is no longer acceptable once the liberals have broken down a new moral barrier. Homosexual marriage is one example. Once you give your assent to that, there is no turning back. Border restrictions and legalized abortion are two more examples. Trump has shown a sincere desire to turn back some of the incremental gains of the liberals; therefore, they must destroy him. Incremental Jacobinism has advanced beyond the Robespierre Jacobinism of the Russian communists; the liberals have incrementally killed the Christian faith of the European people. Without that faith the European people have nothing inside of them that says, “We won’t accept your world.” They accept the liberals’ world because they don’t believe there ever was any other world. We desperately need a European Puddleglum.
“No. I suppose that other world must be all a dream.”
“Yes. It is all a dream,” said the Witch, always thrumming.
“Yes, all a dream,” said Jill.
“There never was such a world,” said the Witch.
“No,” said Jill and Scrubb, “never was such a world.”
“There never was any world but mine,” said the Witch.
“There never was any world but yours,” said they.
Puddleglum was still fighting hard. “I don’t know rightly what you all mean by a world,” he said, talking like a man who hasn’t enough air. “But you can play that fiddle till your fingers drop off, and still you won’t make me forget Narnia, and the whole Overworld too. We’ll never see it again, I shouldn’t wonder. You may have blotted it out and turned it dark like this, for all I know. Nothing more likely. But I know I was there once. I’ve seen the sky full of stars. I’ve seen the sun coming up out of the sea of a morning and sinking behind the mountains at night. And I’ve seen him up in the midday sky when I couldn’t look at him for brightness.”
Puddleglum’s words had a very rousing effect. The other three all breathed again and looked at one another like people newly awaked.
“Why, there it is!” cried the Prince. “Of course! The blessing of Aslan upon this honest Marshwiggle. We have all been dreaming, these last few minutes. How could we have forgotten it? Of course we’ve all seen the sun.”
-C. S. Lewis, The Silver Chair
The venomous beast that must be killed before the European everyman can begin the journey back to the spiritual realm of existence is the great scholastic dragon. The churchmen had a choice. They could have chosen the way of the passionate heart, the way of St. Paul and those noble Europeans who followed in St. Paul’s train by holding Christ in their hearts. But the churchmen went the way of Hawthorne’s Mr. Smooth-it-away in “The Celestial Railroad” and the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. Was it ever supposed to be that easy? “Can wisdom be put in a silver rod, Or love in a golden bowl?” We do not need great intellects, we need hearts that love Christ in and through the people of Europe, whom the liberals demonize while simultaneously denying that they ever existed. Edgar’s words, “Men must endure their going hence even as their coming hither,” echo our Lord’s words, “He who endures to the end shall be saved.” The passionate heart, the European who loves much, shall endure to the end. +