Satan’s Liberal Reign

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

--Shakespeare’s Macbeth

In The Lancashire Witches, the English Victorian novelist William Harrison Ainsworth describes the havoc caused by a number of witches living and practicing their craft in the early part of the 17^th century. John Buchan also wrote about witches frequenting the Scottish Highlands during the early 17^th century in his novel Witchwood. Neither novelist treats the existence of witches and witchcraft as imaginary. That a small minority of women and men were willing to renounce Christ and serve Satan in order to attain some illicit desire or simply to do evil for its own sake was taken as an absolute fact by Ainsworth and Buchan.

I think there are more people doing the work of the devil in our modern age than at any other time in history, but I think there are fewer people who have consciously given themselves to Satan as depicted in the novels of Buchan and Ainsworth because a person needs to have faith in the existence of Christ in order to believe in His demonic opponent. The modern man lacks that faith.

The decadent French author Andre Gide once said, “I don’t believe in the devil, but that is what the devil wants.” Where there is belief in the devil, there is also belief in the God-Man. The witches in Ainsworth’s novel know Christ is the Son of God, but they hate Christ and love evil. Satan probably prefers the non-believing diabolists such as Gide, because where there is belief in Christ’s divinity there is also the chance for repentance. Indeed one witch in Ainsworth’s novel forsakes Satan for Christ, and she, even she, is not denied mercy by the God of mercy.

A world in which a minority of men and women knowingly give themselves over to Satan and the vast majority of people actively oppose Satanism in Christ’s name is an infinitely better world than the world in which we live now. The worst villain in Buchan's and Ainsworth’s novels is in better shape soul-wise than any of our respected citizens of Modernia. If a person knows there is a devil and a Savior, that there is damnation and there is heaven, he is still alive, and life has meaning for him because what happens on earth has an eternal significance.

In contrast the modern man “has supped full of horrors.” His satanic forefathers, the Rosicrucians, alchemists, wizards, and practitioners of the occult sciences won out; they institutionalized Satanism. But when Satanism is institutionalized the initial vision is lost. Abortionists, feminists, and Negro-worshipping clergymen who no longer believe in Satan do more evil in one day than Satan’s most devoted adherents in the ‘good old days’ did in a whole year! But of course it is a much duller evil. No spells, no midnight cavorting on the heath, just regular, everyday evil in the abortuaries, in our schools, and in our churches.

It would seem that the milquetoast Satanists of today would be easy to defeat. But unfortunately that is not the case, because genuine virtue, the virtue that is full of fire and passion, is non-existent in the ranks of the Europeans. The best of them, Yeats tells us, lack conviction, and they lack conviction because they have lost their moral vision. They don’t see with their hearts. Why, for instance, is there even a debate about the existences of mosques in Europe or the United States? No antique European would have allowed any kind of Moslem presence in Christendom. And abortuaries? No man of European blood would allow them to exist on Christian soil. There is no moral clarity in even the best of the modern Europeans because having lost half of their faith in the God-Man, they have given partial assent to the Satanic agenda of the liberals which translates to, “We’ll worship the Negro if you threw the name of Christ somewhere into the service; we’ll permit abortion so long as its done democratically; and we will allow Moslems, Mexicans, and blacks into our nation to defile it in the name of abstractions called religious liberty and toleration.” ‘No moral vision’ is the epitaph for the modern, halfway-house Christian European.

The great temptation for the antique European living in Liberaldom is the halfway-house Christians, who stand on the shores of Liberaldom beckoning the antique European on: “There is Christian fellowship and love here. We are not asking you to abandon the Christian faith, we only ask you to abandon your antiquated notions of the Christian faith.” And a man, because he is a man, is tempted. But as he approaches the shores he sees the ruins of European ships on the rocks. He sees the halfway-house Christians drinking tea with the abortionists, and he sees the images of black men on the same altar as Christ. At the last moment, he turns his ship aside and sets sail for the open sea. Bulkington has it right: better to risk an ocean perishing than be dashed on the rocks of Liberaldom.

It is well and good, in terms of earthly comfort, for the halfway-house Christians to avoid any conflict with institutionalized Satanism by proclaiming Christ to be a liberal. But it just won’t do. The Old Testament prophets and the European poets got it right. Life is passion, life is of the spirit, and life is of the blood. Satan is our sworn enemy, and his friends, knowingly or unknowingly, are our enemies. The antique European cannot and will not compromise or temporize in the face of institutionalized Satanism, even if it assumes a benign, respectable face. We know who is behind the mask.

Quite possibly Satan feels a little nostalgic for the days when he had fewer people doing his will but a greater number of people passionately devoted to him. Ever the pragmatist, however, he sticks to modernity because he knows that he dare not stir up the passions of the European. Satan knows that passion can be turned against him; instead of loving Satan, the European might turn to Christ. It is passion that is wanting in the European, not intellectual acumen or esoteric knowledge. In the depths of the soul, where the battle between God and devil rageth, is where the European needs to live.

From my own puppet show of memory I recall the statement of a burned-out, drug-soaked hippie in a literature class with me. I was struggling toward the light at that time of my life and growing increasingly indignant with professors of literature who loved Christian poets such as Spenser and Shakespeare but openly mocked the faith that inspired those Christian poets. In a heated exchange I told my professor that I had no desire to believe anything different than my European ancestors; their lights and my meager light all pointed to one magnificent truth: Christ was the Son of the living God. Of course, my little outburst was considered quite amusing and everyone went back to the structural, anthropological, psychological study of the great works of Western literature. A few days later the burned out hippie came up to me in the library. “What you said in class about that Christ guy – it’s true. I know it’s true because there is a devil.” In the depths that our heroic European ancestors plumbed is the truth about God and the devil. It’s what Melville was saying when he wrote, in reference to Shakespeare, “All that we seek and shun is there, Man’s final lore.”

The old hag in Robert Louis Stevenson’s book Kidnapped said that blood built the house of Shaw and blood will bring it down. Satan built his kingdom on the watered-down, illicit passions of his devotees. The licit passion to worship the living God in spirit and truth will bring down Liberaldom. +

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When thou art come into the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not learn to do after the abominations of those nations. There shall not be found among you any one that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that useth divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch. Or a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a necromancer. For all that do these things are an abomination unto the LORD: and because of these abominations the LORD thy God doth drive them out from before thee.

Deuteronomy 18: 9 - 12