Into the Hand of God

And is then example nothing? It is every thing. Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other. This war is a war against that example. It is not a war for Louis the Eighteenth, or even for the property, virtue, fidelity of France. It is a war for George the Third, for Francis the Second, and for all the dignity, property, honour, virtue, and religion of England, of Germany, and of all nations. – Edmund Burke

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When Jim Webb was writing as a former naval officer, not as a government official, he wrote an article stating his heartfelt opinion as to why women soldiers should not be used in combat. He was attacked by the liberals for his opinions. Once Webb became a government official, he changed his mind about female troops in combat. He was then lauded by the liberals for his “growth.” Chief Justice Roberts came to the Supreme Court as a Bush appointee and a “conservative.” As such he was, in the eyes of the liberals, a very bad man. But then the strict constructionist voted for Obamacare and he, like Webb, became a man of integrity who had “grown” during his tenure in office. He saw the liberal light. Even more recently a “conservative” columnist named David Blankenhorn, who used to be an outspoken opponent of gay marriage, decided that gay marriage was a wonderful thing. Need we add that Blankenhorn was lauded by the liberals for his new-found “integrity”? I could supply hundreds of examples of sudden growth by conservatives. It seems to be a very common phenomenon.

When I was in my early teens I remember seeing an ad for a Kim Novak movie (I realize I date myself by mentioning Kim Novak), which asked the question, “What strange power does she have over men?” It was pretty obvious, even to a fourteen year old boy – or maybe especially to a fourteen year old boy – what power Kim Novak had over men. It’s just as obvious what strange power the mad-dog liberals have over the liberal-conservatives. They hold the keys to wealth, power, and popularity because they are the rulers of the European people. It might be possible to obtain wealth without being a mad-dog liberal, but power and popularity in large doses are not attainable outside the kennels of the mad-dog liberals. And since the conservative-liberal is not really a principled conservative in the Burkean sense of the word, he can quite easily be seduced by mad-dog liberalism, just as the men in the old movies fell victim to the seductive charms of Kim Novak.

With the exception of some demented sickies such as Newt Gingrich, who is power mad to an extraordinary degree, the treachery of the conservative-liberals seems to be motivated by a fear of being unpopular. Of course in a democracy, which has obtained sacred status in the European nations, one’s popularity is connected to wealth and power. When an unpopular politician loses an election he also loses wealth and power. But that still doesn’t explain why politicians, who already have wealth and power and no longer have to worry about reelection still behave like cowards in order to avoid unpopularity.  Ronald Reagan was a classic case in point. There was absolutely nothing to prevent him from pardoning Oliver North, who had run afoul of the liberals because he served his President and his country, except for Reagan’s fear of being unpopular with liberals who wanted a witch-hunt show trial. It was the same with Reagan’s prolife stance. He could have personally attended the prolife rallies, instead of phoning in his “support,” and given a rousing fight to the knife speech, except for his fear of being unpopular with his liberal wife and liberals in general. I’ve also observed this fear of being unpopular with liberals in tenured, conservative academicians and ‘job secure for life’ clerics who profess to be appalled at some of the uglier manifestations of liberalism, such as liberalized abortion.

I once saw a journalist’s interview with a movie director who had a reputation for being an actor’s director, a director whom actors liked. The question posed to him was, “How did you become an actor’s director?” His answer? He told a story about one of his early directorial jobs in which Orson Welles was the star of the movie as well as the screenwriter for the movie. One day in the middle of a scene Orson Welles stormed off the set and went to his dressing room. Of course the young director went to Welles’ dressing room and asked him what the problem was. Welles asked the director, “Who’s the star of this picture?”

“You are, Orson,” the director replied.

“Am I doing a good job?”

“Of course, you are, Orson; you’re doing a magnificent job.”

“Who wrote the screenplay for the movie?”

“You did, Orson.”

“Is it a good screenplay?”

“Yes, it’s a great screenplay.”

“If I’m doing a magnificent job acting and I wrote a great screenplay, then why haven’t you told me about it and praised me for it.”

“But, Orson, I thought you knew you were excellent and the screenplay was great. I didn’t think you needed to be constantly praised for your work.”

Welles’ reply was quite interesting, and I think it applies to academics, clergyman, and politicians as well as actors. Welles told the young director that all children want praise for everything they do, no matter how seemingly insignificant what they have done might seem to the adults around them. And children in a loving home usually get that exorbitant praise, but most people, Welles maintained, as they grow up realize that they can’t expect the world to fawn over them and constantly praise them for everything they do. The actor or actress is different. Something happened to them inside; they never lost the desire to be constantly praised and fawned upon. The young director never forgot what Welles told him and consequently he became known as an actor’s director.

Actors, academics, politicians, and clergy might have a more obsessive need to be loved and adored than other people, but I think we all desire to be popular and appreciated by as many people as possible. It’s a very human desire and not necessarily an evil one. Unless – and the ‘unless’ makes all the difference – a man sacrifices his soul in order to be liked and adored by the multitude. Because a man, if he is a man, must have causes and people he loves whether or not they are popular. “Though all the world betray thee – One sword at least thy rights shall guard, One faithful harp shall praise thee,” must be the stance of a real man, a European man, vis-à-vis the things he loves. In my judgment the most damning thing that can be said of a man is that he doesn’t love anything or anybody deeply enough to love in spite of the hatred of the multitude. And that is the condemnation I hurl at the modern halfway house Christians and their secular counterparts, the conservative liberals. They do not love antique Europe and antique Europe’s God enough to forsake the fawning favor of the liberals, who call all loyal Europeans racist, in order to fight the unpopular and lonely fight for Christian Europe. “You can’t condemn them for wanting to be popular,” Mr. Smooth-it-over Easy tells me. But, to paraphrase Scott-King, “I can condemn them and I do.”

Let me go back to the Kim Novak analogy. Every civilization, including the vaunted Greek civilization of antiquity, could not handle the sexual aspect of man’s nature. The pagans tried to regulate sexual activity by incorporating it into their religions, but they never could elevate their civilizations to a level where men saw that sexual pleasure was only a minor component in a larger, divine plan for mankind. I’m not naïve about the failures of Christian Europeans to completely rise above the pagan temptations, but if we take Christian Europe for all in all, there is incontestable evidence that the Christian Europeans did what the wisest pagan sages considered impossible: by loving in and through the incarnate God they spiritualized human love without Gnosticizing it. Of course no modern European believes that such a Europe, a Europe that transcended paganism, existed. Having violated the pact between God and man, to use God’s gifts as God intended them to be used, the modern Europeans cannot conceive of a people who could transcend paganism.

The pagan, cosmic temptation, to lose one’s soul in the impersonal force of sexuality, was only conquered by the Christian Europeans’ passion to make human love and love for the living God an incorporate union. The modern Europeans’ desire to conform to liberalism and by conforming obtain the popularity that mortal men crave is the result of removing mortal love from divine love. Only a love for a personal God and the civilization that came from that love could turn a man away from the pursuit of vain glory and unlimited sexual pleasure.

In the absence of any personal attachment to the God and people of Christian Europe, the modern European will never leave the liberal pigsties of popularity. All his better instincts will be killed in their infancy because he will be afraid that if he follows his nobler instincts, he will be cast out from the company of his fellow men and from the love of God. And the last point is the key point. Only a man who feels that God is with him (if God be for me who can stand against me?) can stand alone against the world. So long as the European everyman accepts the mind-forged doctrine which says that God can only be known through a closed system presided over by clerical boogey men, he will remain mesmerized and emasculated by liberalism, because our churchmen tell us that their systems are all in all. And the all in all of a closed system, man-made Christianity is liberalism. (1)

A man needs to have faith in the living God rather than the parchments of a perfect constitutional system or a perfect religious system. Satan wants the Europeans to engage in endless debates about the best systems in politics and religion. And the Europeans have fallen into Satan’s trap. What Satan doesn’t tell the Europeans is that the living God is not to be found in their closed systems that they so proudly proclaim to be the truth and the way. The living god is above systems and the pygmy minds who invent systems as a replacement for God. If we accept the mind-forged world of the system makers we will never have the faith in God that is necessary to stand alone against the liberals, because the God of the system makers is subject to the rules of the system. If the system makers declare that Christ is subordinate to a natural world order dedicated to the worship of negroes, the man who doesn’t have faith in God instead of a system that encompasses God will ultimately become – even if he resists at first – a devotee of the Noble Black Savage.

The great divide between the antique Europeans and the modern Europeans is strikingly clear to anyone who steps away from the world of systems and enters the world of the Europeans of old. They, the Europeans who lived in the Europe of the living God, felt that God revealed Himself through His people. He spoke directly to them and he cared about what happened to them collectively and personally. As a result of that “rather odd” (from a modern standpoint) view of God, the antique European was not afraid of the dark because he knew that his God was with him and his people. Minnie Louise Haskins speaks for the Europeans who believed in a God above and beyond all systems.

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’
And he replied:
‘Go into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.’
So I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night. And He led me towards the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

It’s one of the many paradoxes of the spiritual life. A man must not be afraid to stand alone against the world, with only his faith in his Redeemer, before he can discover that he is not alone. Faith builds upon faith, which is why one man with faith in the Christ who knows not systems can truly move the mountains of Liberaldom from the green and pleasant land of Europe. +

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(1) The reason all resistance to liberalism fails is because the conservatives with some decent instincts, such as the Tea Party people, never attack the central faith of liberalism, which is the cult of the Noble Black Savage, because they fear the condemnation of the religious boogeymen who have transformed European Christianity into a nature religion centered on the worship of negroes.