The Seat of the Scornful

“Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of the scornful. – Psalm 1:1

Walter Scott in the introduction to Quentin Durward and again in Kenilworth states that the mark of the devil is a sneering, mocking, scornful countenance. My own observations of liberals leads me to concur with Scott; the scornful derisive, sneer is truly the mark of the devil. Scott lamented that in his own time the contemptuous sneer was used to attack the Christian faith:

There has never been an hour or an age, in which this formidable weapon has been more actively employed against the Christian faith than our own day. Wit and ridicule have formed the poignant sauce with which infidels have seasoned their abstract reasoning, and voluptuaries the swinish messes of pollution, which they have spread unblushingly before the public. It is a weapon suited to the character of the Apostate Spirit himself, such as we conceive him to be—loving nothing, honouring nothing, feeling neither the enthusiasm of religion nor of praise, but striving to debase all that is excellent, and degrade all that is noble and praiseworthy, by cold irony and contemptuous sneering.

What would Scott say about modern liberals, who have mocked and sneered at the Christian faith to an extent that makes the 18^th century mocker look like a good Joe in comparison? He would say what Macduff said: “Fit to govern? Not fit to live!” We are governed by an elite band of mockers and scorners who in healthy times would have been imprisoned for their poisonous, hate-filled ideology.

I think Scott was correct in calling our attention to an inordinate fear of ridicule that puts the antique Christian in a state of terror before those who mock and ridicule his Christian faith. Dickens makes a similar point in Great Expectations when he shows Pip to be obsessed with gaining the good opinion of those people whom he most despises.

The Rousseauian liberal – and all liberals are Rousseauian – used two very basic tactics to undermine the antique European's faith in his people’s vision of God and the culture they created based on that vision. First, the liberal mocked the intelligence of the antique European, claiming he was unscientific and childish. And secondly, he accused the antique European of being hypocritical because he fought wars in the name of the Prince of Peace, and he failed to treat all men, particularly the colored man, as his brother. In the first instance, the liberal’s assumption of superior intelligence does not stand up to the test of reality. Is Freud smarter than Shakespeare because he wore a lab coat, smoked a pipe, and had a doctorate? And was Darwin wiser than St. Paul because he was “scientific” and objective while St. Paul was unscientific and subjective? This is nonsense; the liberals’ heroes are intellectual pygmies because they can’t think with their hearts, the true source of knowledge. Shakespeare and St. Paul knew that; Darwin, Freud, and their liberal descendants never knew it and never will.

In the second instance, we are faced with another liberal hypocrisy. They deny the truth of the Europeans’ vision of Christ, that He was indeed the Son of God, yet they demand the right to tell Christian Europeans how they should live the Christian faith. What right does a liberal, who is a past and present advocate of mass murder (Stalin, Mao Tse-Tung, legalized abortion) have to condemn the Christian European for his failure to end war? Better to ask if the European’s Christian faith has made a difference in the way war is viewed and the way wars are fought? The man who looks through not with the eye can see a difference. And the brotherhood of man? No European of the Christian era ever equated the Christian belief in the universal brotherhood of all men and women in Christ, with a democratic, egalitarian society where there was no recognition of the spiritual difference between the races. Spiritual gifts are aristocratic, not democratic. The attempt to democratize things of the spirit is liberal uptopian, not Christian European.

The liberal rejects the older culture of the white man because the incarnate Lord can be found in that culture, and he hates the incarnate God just as much as the Jews and the Muslims hate the incarnate God. With the colored barbarians it is a different story. They don’t hate the Christian God as the liberals do; they are completely indifferent to Him. He doesn’t reach them at a deep level; they are more attracted to a God who promises them wealth and power than a suffering servant God who promises them a cross. This is why the “Christian” T. V. pastors who preach an Islamic Christianity always have an audience that is almost entirely black. And it is also why black Africa is becoming Islamic. If the Europeans were strong in their Christian faith they could at least compel the colored people to comply with the ethical standards of the Christian faith, even if interior assent to the faith itself was withheld. The blacks can always be kept in check if the white man is strong in his faith.

But of course the white man is not strong in his ancient faith, which is the Christian faith; he is zealous in behalf of his new mind-forged utopian faith. This new, bastard faith of the white man is based on a maniacal hatred of the incarnate Christ of Europe and an obsessive love of the generic black man, the noble savage. And the essential paper edifice of the liberal’s new faith is the abstraction. The Sadducees and the Pharisees were unable to recognize the true God when He came amongst them because they made the minutiae of the law the entirety of the law. They worshipped their own abstractions and neglected the true object of God’s law, which is justice, mercy and faith. Directly parallel in their mind set to the legalistic Jews were the French revolutionaries of 1789. Burke reports that the majority of French legislators had law degrees. Forgetting that all change in a Christian society should be change that conserves what is Christian, the French assembly of lawyers killed Christian France with a lawyers’ brief against their Christian King. All the governments of Europe and the European nations have followed the lead of the ancient Jews and the French revolutionaries, and have built a new world based on their own abstractions and a hatred of Jesus Christ. Why the hatred? Because the modern European, like the pharisaical Jew, cannot abide a God who bids us take up our cross and follow Him. What was once the hope and the symbol of Europe, the cross of Christ, has become a scandal to the European, just as it was and is a scandal to the Jews.

When the old “anti-semitic” Europeans warned about organized Jewry, what were they talking about? They were talking about a people who had hardened their hearts against all things Christian. Their legal system was set up to shield them from Christ’s love. This is why Antonio realizes the futility of looking for mercy from the hardened Jewish heart:

I pray you, think, you question with the Jew:
You may as well go stand upon the beach
And bid the main flood bate his usual height;
You may as well use question with the wolf
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb;
You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops and to make no noise,
When they are fretten with the gusts of heaven;
You may as well do anything most hard,
As seek to soften that--than which what's harder?--
His Jewish heart: therefore, I do beseech you,
Make no more offers, use no farther means,
But with all brief and plain conveniency
Let me have judgment and the Jew his will.

Of course Shylock didn’t get his will, because in that instance Christians refused to allow Europe to be run by the laws of Jewry. But now Europeans have become like unto the Jews in the hardness of their hearts toward all things Christian and in their use of the minutiae of the law to kill the spirit of God’s law, the law of justice, mercy and faith.

In his anti-communist manifesto entitled Witness, Whittaker Chambers told us of the communist leaders’ obsession with official documents. Every government department had mountains and mountains of official documents. In reflecting on that phenomenon Chambers came to the conclusion that the Communists inundated Russia with official documents because their regime had no moral legitimacy. They sought to replace moral legitimacy with an artificial legitimacy of official documents which were the moral equivalent of the deaf shouting warnings to the deaf.

America has achieved, or should we say has deteriorated to the same moral illegitimacy as the Russian communists. Justice, mercy, and faith count for nothing in America and Europe; the upward and onward push to a democratic, interracial, godless world counts for everything. But is equality ever really the goal of the utopian? No, it isn’t. Some will always be more equal than others. Remember the seven commandments of Animal Farm?

Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
No animal shall wear clothes.
No animal shall sleep in a bed.
No animal shall drink alcohol.
No animal shall kill any other animal.
All animals are equal.

And then the seven commandments became one:

All Animals Are Equal
But Some Animals Are More
Equal Than Others

When “our grace we have forgot,” when we abandon our faith in a spiritual aristocracy we will have an aristocracy of the cruel and degenerate (the liberals) who will elevate the base (the negroes) to the status of gods.

In the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, the third dumb brother who is pure of heart often wins the hand of the King’s daughter despite his lowly origins. In the older European regimes there was seldom such a direct correlation between spiritual gifts and high office. The best man, as the character Sapp in Prisoner of Zenda tells us, does not always become King. Nevertheless the older Europeans tried to structure their societies in such a way that the principle of noblesse oblige took precedence over the rights of man. The former principle, though not utopian, is more conducive to fostering Christian faith and Christian charity than the latter principle, which, despite sounding quite humane, always produces a world where “humanity must perforce prey on itself, like monsters from the deep.”

Orwell, having fought his way through the process, saw the devil’s horns protruding from every utopian scheme. The liberals’ utopia started with a few high-minded edicts about racial equality, but in the end the liberals have only one commandment: “The white is evil, and the black is sacred.” And missing from the liberal’s “utopia” is the God who the racist Europeans held aloft as the Savior of all mankind. The only equality shared by all men is their dependence on His mercy. What kind of society is it that holds His mercy, and the people who sought His mercy, as something to be sneered at and held up to ridicule? It is a satanic society where black-worshipping liberals sit in the seats of the scornful. They think their reign will be forever, but the men of Europe who still see the Cross of Christ through a glass darkly will live to see the end of the men of scorn and the triumph of the Man of Sorrows. +