So may the outward shows be least themselves; The world is still deceiv’d with ornament. – Merchant of Venice
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All European revolutions and counter-revolutions are started and sustained by people who think that all of their actions on behalf of the cause are done in the sight of God. For good or ill there would be no revolutions or counter-revolutions without the participants’ belief that whether they failed or succeeded their God saw and approved of their efforts. Implicit in the British soldier’s heroic defense of Rorke’s drift was the belief that in fighting for Britain and against the Zulus he was fighting for Christian civilization in the sight of his God. Likewise the communist: he fights for the future reign of the people, and he believes that those people of the future will see what he has done and approve of it. And finally we have the modern liberal with his triune God: The Father–The Intellect Detached from the Heart, The Son–The Negro, The Unholy Ghost–Science. The liberal wants his fellow detached intellects to see his efforts on behalf of the Negro, and he wants to be applauded for his efforts. And he wants the divine Son of the divinely detached intellect, the negro, to see his efforts on behalf of the negro and to give his blessing to the devotee. Then comes the last part of the unholy satanic sideshow: the liberals seek a comforter, someone or something that can sustain them in their battle against the recalcitrant Europeans. Call it Science Descending, it envelops the liberal in an anesthetizing gas which renders him incapable of any heartfelt feeling about any aspect of existence. Through the unholy ghost called science, the liberal achieves oblivion; he is sans feeling, sans thinking, sans everything but a desire to serve his triune god.
It’s been said of liberals that they are politically correct even in restrooms. When Big Brother is not watching them they still censor themselves; no racist comments ever slip from their lips. That is because they always have the image of their god before their eyes. Wherever they are, they feel they are in the sight of their god.
Theologians have written volumes about the distinctions between the visible church and the mystical church. In my view the visible church consists of those outward ceremonies and professions of faith that can be seen by the naked eye and heard by the ear. For instance, I can see John Doe walking to church, and I can hear him reciting the creed in church; those are visible signs that John Doe is a member of that particular church. The mystical church is something different. It consists of those silken threads of sympathy and love by which we are bound to our God, but which are not visible to the naked eye.
Membership in the two churches is not mutually exclusive nor is it necessarily mutually inclusive. A man can profess belief in Jesus Christ while maintaining a mystical faith in the negro, and a man might eschew the outward ceremonies of religious worship and yet maintain a mystical connection to the living God. Charity demands that we assume a man believes what he professes, until he proves, by revealing where his treasure lies, that his true faith is other than his professed faith.
It is my contention that the members of visible, organized Christianity (with a few exceptions, which is always the case) have severed their mystical ties with Christ and become members of the mystical church of the liberals. This is painfully evident when we see where their treasure, and therefore their heart, lies. Their hearts lie with the unrepentant Jews, the unsexed women called feminists, and above all else, with the negroes. The liberals who are not members of the visible Christian church nor the mystical Christian church are easier to detect than the professed Christians who are mystical liberals. But the antique European, who still has a mystical connection to his God, must not be deceived by the outward professions of faith of the halfway-house Christians. They are our enemies. It’s very unpleasant to think that no one has our backs – on the contrary, those who profess Christ will stab us in the back in the name of Christ — but that is the reality, and our Lord told us it would be so:
They shall put you out of the synagogues: yea, the time cometh, that whosoever killeth you will think that he doeth God good service.
And these things will they do unto you, because they have not known the Father, nor me.
Those words should resonate with us. Don’t the halfway house Christians seek to kill the old “racist” Christianity and the people who still adhere to it? And haven’t the halfway-house Christians severed their mystical ties to Christ by cutting themselves off from their own people, past and present? The mystical ties of honor and blood that bind us to our kith and kin also bind us to God. When we have only the outward visible signs of faith but lack the inner, invisible current of faith, we have not faith.
The antique European, in my judgment, is the hero of the modern drama. And the hero must be willing to fight for the good. That goes without saying. But the hero must also be able to see the good and discern evil. That is much more difficult than the actual fighting. In Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, Arthur watches his knights defeat the heathen knights while violating every law of chivalry. Only Arthur, who can discern good from evil, sees the victory as a Pyrrhic victory:
So all the ways were safe from shore to shore,
But in the heart of Arthur pain was lord.
What enables a man to see past the ornaments of life to that which is within? The Roman Catholic traditionalists forsook their ancient people for a formulaic replica of the past, and the Biblical Christians, “with sober brow,” made a whited sepulcher of their new found interpretation of Scripture that allows them to be outwardly Christian while inwardly Jewish. Such a falling off comes when Europeans break with their past by seeing only the dry parchments and church rituals of the past as worth preserving. Those ornaments are only symbols of the spirit and blood faith of the antique Europeans.
The mystical church, which is the animating spirit of Europe, is to be found in the people of old Europe. Look at their spiritual history as told by the chroniclers, the poets. In Shakespeare, the archetypal European, we see a world where outward forms count for nothing. It is the inner life that matters.
So may the outward shows be least themselves:
The world is still deceived with ornament.
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it and approve it with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts:
— The Merchant of Venice
Le Fanu adds his voice to Shakespeare’s:
This world is a parable – the habitation of symbols – the phantoms of spiritual things immortal shown in material shape.
That essential wisdom of the European people, which was the fruit of centuries of spiritual struggle, that the material world is but a symbol of the spiritual world, has been pushed aside in modern Europe. The liberals and the ornamental Christians side with the people of color because they share the same “this world only” religion. They are united in a celebration of outward forms without spiritual substance.
Self-styled, hardheaded “realists” get very angry when you talk about the things of the spirit. They feel talking about such things leads to a “pie in the sky” attitude that ensures defeat because those who see God in the heavens are defeatists who look for victory in the next world while surrendering to the enemy in this world. But if such was the case why did the antique Europeans, the members of the mystical Christian church, conquer the world? It is a paradox, but it is reality; those Europeans who worshipped the God who was not of this world, conquered the world in His name.
In every introductory course in philosophy we are told that arguments from history are not valid arguments, because such arguments are subjective; a man can foist his own personal prejudices on the argument from history. It is only by using the objective method, the Socratic dialogue, the philosophers tell us, eschewing all prejudices acquired from messy, anecdotal histories, that a man can arrive at the truth. I’d like to say that with all due respect I differ with the philosophers. But I can’t say that, because I don’t have any respect for the philosophers. Just as literary critics have no understanding of existence because they approach a work of literature with the detached minds of scientists intent on finding the truth by dissection, so the philosophers destroy thought by detaching it from the human heart. And because of that fateful divorce the philosophers, the men who make their living as thinkers, are always wrong about everything. The Badger and Mole know that Toad will return, because they argue from History, not Philosophy.
“They argued from history,” continued the Rat. “They said that no criminal laws had ever been known to prevail against cheek and plausibility such as yours, combined with the power of a long purse. So they arranged to move their things into Toad Hall, and sleep there, and keep it aired, and have it all ready for you when you turned up.”
What do we know of anything if we don’t argue from history? Do we even know if we exist at all if we don’t know our family history? How did the people whose God entered history come to the conclusion that all arguments from history were invalid? I do argue from history. All we know of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, comes from the history of the European people. Without that history we are lost souls, sitting in a sterile classroom, trying to make sense out of an a priori assumption about the meaninglessness of existence. Or we might be sitting in a church seminar trying to make sense of church documents or Holy Scriptures, but without a blood connection to our European ancestors the church documents and the Holy Scriptures are as sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.
The European alone possesses the moral vision to reject gaudy gold and pale silver in preference for the meager leaden casket, whose plainness cloaks its magnificence. The leaden casket is for those who belong to the mystical church. That Church will endure till the end of time, because it is eternally linked to the European and to Him. +