–Except this. That as they were assembled in the old Hall, by no other light than that of a great a fire (having dined early), the shadows once more stole out of their hiding-places, and danced about the room, showing the children marvelous shapes and faces on the walls, and gradually changing what was real and familiar there to what was wild and magical. But that there was one thing in the Hall to which the eyes of Redlaw, and of Milly and her husband, and of the old man, and of the student, and his bride that was to be, were often turned, which the shadows did not obscure or change. Deepened in its gravity by the fire-light, and gazing from the darkness of the paneled wall like life, the sedate face in the portrait, with the beard and ruff, looked down at them from under its verdant wreath of holly, as they looked up at it, and, clear and plain below, as if a voice had uttered them, were the words: ‘Lord, keep my Memory Green!’ — The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain
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When I was a child there was no question which season was the best season of the year. It was summer. There was no school in summer, and you could do so many outdoor activities in summer that you could not do in winter. And my love of summer continued into my adulthood, because when I married and had children I enjoyed the summertime activities with my children. However, now that my children have grown, I find, much to my surprise, that the hated autumn, hated because it meant the end of summer, has become my favorite season. Physically and spiritually autumn now appeals to me more than summer. But I can still understand why so many people adore summer and do not welcome autumn. So I understood and sympathized with a young woman, about 30 years of age, standing next to me in line at a local amusement park this past August, when she said that she hated to see the end of summer. I said, “Yes, it is sad to see ‘the last rose of summer.’” The woman’s response surprised me.
“That is beautiful, did you just think it up?”
Now, I wasn’t quoting Proust or Joyce, or some other esoteric writer of the past, I was quoting one of Thomas Moore’s songs that used to be as widely known as the Beatles’ Let It Be. I suppose I shouldn’t have been so surprised, because I frequently encounter, in this brave new world of diversity, white people who have no knowledge of Christian Europe. Apparently a diverse education no longer extends to our spiritual progenitors, the antique Europeans. (1)
The Christian Europeans were intimately concerned with history, particularly their history, because they believed, unlike all other people, that their God had entered human history. Once you believe in the Christ story, once you have taken that story into your heart, you can no longer view history as a cyclic process; you believe human history began in the Garden of Eden and will end with the second coming of our Lord. And in between those two events the history of every single human being is of “eternal moment,” because He has created us in His image, to share all eternity with Him or to go to hell, if we choose to go to hell. So it is of no small consequence — it is of eternal consequence — that the modern Europeans have chosen hell over His kingdom come.
There are warning labels on alcohol, cigarettes, and a good deal of our food products, but there are no warning labels on our culture. We don’t see any signs in our schools – “What you learn here, if taken to heart, will send you to hell.” Nor do our churches have any warning signs as we enter – “Warning, we believe that hell is heaven and heaven is hell, abandon Christian Europe if you enter this church.” And on it goes. If the liberals were honest and forthright, they would warn people that all the major institutions of Liberaldom lead us to hell, but if the liberals were honest and forthright they wouldn’t be liberals. So the great lie, the lie that says the liberals’ hell is really heaven, goes unchallenged.
In Christian Europe the European everyman served the King because the King served Christ. Kings who forgot their rule came from Christ frequently ceased to rule. It is quite different in Liberaldom. The liberals have instituted the principles laid forth in Plato’s Republic. The state does not serve God, God serves the state. So long as your religion does not conflict with the religion of the state, you may have a religion. But is such a religion really a religion if you must make your vision of God subordinate to the state’s vision of God? If Christ is only invoked to condemn racism, but is not invoked to condemn negro worship, feminism and legalized abortion, is He really the same Christ that was worshipped by the antique Europeans, the Christ who rose from the dead on the third day? Of course, He isn’t. That Christ, the Christ of old Europe, has been banned from the liberals’ republic.
The liberals are correct, not morally correct, but tactically correct, to ban all remembrances of Christian Europe, because when a man, a European man, remembers Christian Europe, he will know what he once was, a child of God, and he will remember what he has lost, His kingdom come, by accepting a place in Liberaldom. What then? He will challenge the liberals’ right to rule, and that challenge, the challenge of a European imbued with the power of faith, faith in the living God, is something the liberals cannot abide, because such a challenge will mark the beginning of the end of Liberaldom.
There is a Christmas story by Charles Dickens called The Haunted Man and the Ghost’s Bargain, which should be placed on an equal footing with The Christmas Carol, but for some reason it is not as well known. In the story, the Haunted Man makes a bargain with a ghost. The ghost will give him peace of mind by removing his remembrance of all “sorrow, wrong and trouble.” Of course when the Haunted Man loses his remembrance of all sorrow, wrong and trouble, he loses all contact with humanity. He becomes a walking abstraction, unable to share in the happiness of others, whose happiness is woven in with sorrow, wrong and trouble, and unable to truly empathize with the suffering of others because he has left suffering behind. The story is so contemporary, because the plight of the Haunted Man is the plight of the European people. We have renounced incarnate Europe, we have not kept our memory of that sacred place and those blessed people green. Instead, we have become like unto the living dead — we walk through the valley of the shadow of death-in-life liberalism, completely immune to the suffering of others and the happiness that once was mixed in with the sorrow, wrong and trouble of the antique Europeans. The devil’s lie rules the European people – “You can be happy here on earth; you can avoid all the sorrow, wrong and trouble found in Christ’s Europe if you just follow the liberal way, which is my way.”
At first glance the modern Europeans seem one with Buddha. Didn’t he and his followers believe that an intellectual detachment from suffering humanity was the key to “inner peace”? Yes, there are great similarities between Buddhism and modern liberalism, but the white race can never be exactly like any of the colored races. When whites go wrong — and there is no wrong greater than liberalism — they forge their wrong in a perverse caricature of the faith that their ancestors once held. Thus the modern Europeans are abstracted from humanity just as Buddhists are abstracted from humanity, but the modern white liberal has added a Christian’s evangelical zeal to his Buddhistic abstraction from humanity. We must, the people of the liberal captivity, become abstract humanoids devoid of all humanity or the terrible swift sword of liberalism will cut us down. The Buddhist seeks to avoid evil by intellectually removing himself from it, and the liberal institutionalizes evil in order to avoid the source of all suffering, the people who saw beauty on the cross. Those people are an evil that cannot merely be avoided, they must be purged. The vision that reclaims the Haunted Man and brings him back from death in life to eternal life is the vision that has been banned from the liberals’ Europe:
‘O Thou,’ he said, ‘who, through the teaching of pure love, hast graciously restored me to the memory which was the memory of Christ upon the cross, and of all the good who perished in His cause, receive my thanks, and bless her!’
It is the remembrance of the vision of Christ on the cross that restores the Haunted Man. But the Haunted Man wanted to reclaim his soul; he was not content with death in life; he wanted his humanity back. Is there any indication that the European people want their memory of Christian Europe back? Do they feel the loss of their humanity as the Haunted Man did? No, they do not. They are still wallowing in the pig slime of modernity in the hope that if they consume enough pig slime they will enter the kingdom of God on earth. Because they have no remembrance of what they once were as a people, the Christ bearers, they have become what the science of the liberals tells them they are – mere beasts, fit for one thing, the liberals’ nightmarish world of death in life, stripped of all capacity to love God or man.
Let us put the European people’s tragic fall from grace in simple terms. Suppose there once was a young man, born of God-fearing parents who nurtured him, loved him, and gave him, through their love, an intimate knowledge of the living God. When he became an adult his parents died. At first he grieved and vowed, in his heart, to keep their memory green. And so long as he kept their memory green, he was able to love God and bear up under the sorrows and troubles of the world. But then tragedy ensued. The young man began to listen to the surrounding din of men called academics. From state pulpits and ecclesiastical pulpits they told him of the evil of his parents. They demonized such parents and commanded him and others like him to put the remembrance of their parents out of their minds and hearts and place all their hopes in the new world that the academics were forging, a world devoid of sorrow, wrong and trouble. What would we think of a young man who listened to the academics and let his remembrance of his parents die out? Wouldn’t we call such a man a moral pariah, a reprehensible coward? I would. And that is what I call the modern Europeans, moral pariahs who do not have the moral courage to challenge the liberals’ utopia in the name of the people who bequeathed to them a vision of the living God.
Never, never lose sight of the fact that the liberals’ attack on ‘racist’ whites is an attack on the living God who comes to us through our humanity. If we denounce white pietas, we denounce Him. The Lord has blessed me with many children, and they are indeed a blessing, because they have brought me closer to Christ. In loving them, I have learned so much more about His loving heart than I could ever have learned from theology or philosophy. But if I thought happiness consisted of the absence of sorrow, wrong and trouble, I would have taken the academics’ bargain and rejected fatherhood, because each and every child has increased my burden of sorrow and worry in this world. I love my children, hence I suffer because their sorrows and troubles are my sorrows and troubles. But would I have any happiness in this world, or hope of happiness in the next world, if I did not share the suffering of my loved ones? No, I would not; therefore, I reject the liberals’ bargain, the same bargain the ghost offered to the Haunted Man, a bargain he ultimately rejected. And we should all, we Europeans, reject the liberals’ ghostly bargain and return to His Europe where there is a multitude of sorrow, wrong and trouble, but where there is also the love of God, which passeth the understanding of the liberals, the creatures who have left His kingdom come in order to live in their mind-forged hell on earth.
Pietas, pietas, the passionate love of our own — that is our challenge to liberalism! We shall not yield, we shall not cease to love, even in the face of an avenging army of maniacal, liberal inquisitors who are determined to eradicate the Christian Europeans from the face of the earth. We will counter their hate with our love of Him in and through our people, of happy memory, who loved much and received His forgiveness and His blessing. +
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(1) There are always certain gaps in every man’s or woman’s education. For instance, I was surprised to hear William F. Buckley, an educated man, confess, in his mid-sixties, that he intended to read Moby Dick for the first time. So you might think I am making too much of one woman’s ignorance of “’Tis the Last Rose of Summer.” But that was just one example of what I insist is the loss of something more significant than a lack of knowledge of certain European classics. That woman’s ignorance was representative of a severance, a severance from our people’s incomparable, irreplaceable moral heritage. That moral heritage, which connects us to Him, is much more important than our democratic heritage or our scientific knowledge. Nor is a mere academic knowledge of the great works of Western literature enough. We must have an organic connection to the spirit of the people who produced and loved those great works. “Lost, lost, lost,” says the evil dwarf in Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. And so are we if we don’t see life feelingly and reconnect with those “dear old folk from long ago.”