The Heroic Temper

[He] loved chivalry, truth and honour, freedom and courtesy" but was head-strong, stubborn, romantical and most unwise. – Soldiers of Misfortune by P. C. Wren

In Baroness Orczy’s magnificent novel The Scarlet Pimpernel, an English nobleman frequently risks his life to rescue members of the French nobility who have been condemned to die on the guillotine in the name of liberty, equality, and fraternity. In subsequent novels, the Scarlet Pimpernel (Sir Percy Blakeney) brings down Robespierre and the entire revolutionary government.

I think of the Scarlet Pimpernel whenever I read some underground newspaper report from Rhodesia or South Africa. The people in those nations are desperately in need of Sir Percy Blakeney. But would he be of any use to them? The French aristocrats were given refugee status in England while the beleaguered whites in Rhodesia and South Africa are denied refugee status in every nation of the world. Where then could the Scarlet Pimpernel take the Rhodesian and South African whites? It is against the rules of Liberaldom to flee paradise, and don’t you realize that Rhodesia and South Africa are paradises now that black men are running the show? No matter how trivial the reason, a black African can be granted refugee status in the white countries, but a white Rhodesian or South African is denied refugee status in the face (at least it would be 'in the face' of the liberals if they hadn’t turned all their faces away) of an unrelenting campaign to murder every single white person in Rhodesia and South Africa.

You would be incorrect if you claimed that the Scarlet Pimpernel only existed in the imagination of Baroness Orczy. He exists in the spirit of every European who refuses to allow colored barbarians to torture and kill other Europeans. Christian chivalry was embodied in Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan; in Henry Havelock, the British avenger of Cawnpore and liberator of Lucknow; and in Andries Pretorious, the hero of Blood River, who led the punitive expedition against the Zulus after they massacred Piet Retief and his followers. The Scarlet Pimpernel is a true myth; he is the embodiment of the antique European’s vision of the proper response to bloody tyranny and the murder of the innocents. The response must be non-democratic -- no petitions against murder and torture to a people addicted to murder and torture -- and it must be violent if violence has been used against one’s people. We react according to how hard the enemy is attacking. In the case of the modern liberal and the black barbarian attack on white people, there is no question that the white man must fight back, certainly using different tactics than men like Forrest and Pretorius, but never doctrinally renouncing violence, claiming it is unChristian or impractical. What could be more unChristian than standing idly by while your white countrymen and kinsmen are slain, and what could be more impractical than declaring your Quaker-like pacifism in the face of savage, bloodthirsty barbarians?

Of course any plea for white people to start defending white people falls on deaf or hostile ears. Satan has destroyed the spiritual resolve of the European by poisoning his love for his kith and kin. Without that spiritual resolve the European is cut off from his source of strength – the God who comes to man through His love of kith and kin. If a man does not love his own, he cannot know God, which is why the godless liberals have joined with the black barbarians in a bloodbath that equals in horrific intensity and surpasses in numbers the massacre of Piet Retief and his followers.

The Boers died fighting hopelessly to the last. Retief was made to witness the death of his son and his followers. The young boys were killed with the others. The bodies were piled upon the hill of death, and over them were the bodies of the grooms and attendants. The heart and liver of Retief were removed and taken to Dingaan so that he might look upon them. Over sixty Boers, one Englishman, and numerous attendants lay dead in the sunlight of that morning in February, and the vultures of Hlomo Amabuta came down from the sky. – In Search of South Africa

The Zulu chief Dingaan always feasted and celebrated after the torture and murder of white people, much like The Obama who recently partied at the White House with rapper Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., who sang a song of rapture about Assata Shakur, convicted murderer of the white New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foester. It’s an ongoing race war with only one side fighting, the liberals and the black barbarians. And let no white man hope to vote the war away. Every Republican candidate renounces white people before he runs for office. Witness Ron Paul, one of the better candidates, who recently decided that the deportation of illegal aliens was “too harsh”! Is this the promised end? The white Democrats campaign under the banner of an immediate extermination of the white race while the Republicans campaign under the banner of a gradual extermination of the white race. The promised end of the white man that both parties yearn for is not the promised end that a European, who still remains a European, longs for or supports.

In 1971, two men, Nathaniel Weyl and William Marina, published a book called American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro. In the book Weyl and Marina made a modest proposal that they thought would end much of the racial conflict in the United States. They suggested that white people should have the right of private association, in other words, the right to segregate themselves from blacks in sport, in housing, and in schooling. Such a practical measure, the authors felt, would eliminate the racial tension which was sweeping the country. The authors of American Statesmen on Slavery and the Negro were right, and they were wrong. They were right in saying that their proposals would eliminate much of the racial unrest in the nation, but they were wrong to think that white liberals want to live in a diverse society where black and white get along by respecting their neighbors’ segregated fences. Liberals don’t want the blacks to have their culture and the whites theirs; liberals want to eliminate the white European culture altogether and replace it with the black Babylonian culture. And now, some 40 years since Weyl and Marina penned their modest proposal, the liberals have created their own version of a “diverse” culture. It is a culture dominated by anti-European liberals and black barbarians.

Weyl and Marina were well-meaning, practical sons of Martha who lacked a deep understanding of good and evil. The liberals do not want to co-exist with antique Europeans; they want to eradicate them. The false assumption behind every practical, well-meaning proposal to prevent bloodshed between the black and white is the assumption that the liberals want to prevent bloodshed. Quite the contrary is true. The liberals want to see rivers of blood flowing from white victims who have been offered up on sacrificial altars built to appease the black gods of the liberals.

If you doubt that the liberals want blood, the white man’s blood, just look at the evidence. What happened when blacks ran amuck in the New Orleans Superdome and the surrounding areas where white people were especially vulnerable, because of the flood, to black marauders? Were the liberals outraged? Yes, they were outraged. They were outraged that some white people armed themselves with shotguns in order to save their families from being sacrificed to the black gods. Recently the columnist Matt Drudge reported that which is not supposed to be reported: black on white crime. Again, are the liberals outraged? Yes, they are, but not with the black atrocities; they are outraged with Drudge for reporting the atrocities. And such is always the case, from the “cry me a river” black columnist exulting in the torture murders of Channon Christian and Christian Newsom, to the satanic “loving forgiveness” of Pope John XXIII after black savages tortured and murdered his own priests and nuns. The message is clear: our ancient foe is using his minions, the liberals and the black barbarians, to destroy the Christ-bearing race. He hopes to strike the Creator by attacking His Creatures.

There are two fallacies in the modern propaganda of tolerance, “you respect my culture and I’ll respect yours.” The first fallacy is what we have just articulated: liberals and black barbarians do not want to respect any culture other than their own, especially the white European culture. And the second fallacy is linked to the first: how can people who have no concept of charity or mercy, like the liberals and the black barbarians, have any respect for a people who want to maintain their link to Christian Europe where men revered the God of charity and mercy? The principle of “you respect my culture and I’ll respect yours” can only be applied to differences between Christian European nations. The non-European does not respect other cultures; he wants to destroy them. The Christian European was the only man who could be trusted to treat “the lesser breeds without the law” with paternal charity instead of merciless cruelty. Now that there is no Christian European presence of any significance in the formerly European countries, there is no charity or mercy to be found there. We live in Babylon, where a green-haired, white girl can walk into any abortuary and destroy her child or, if she so desires, cohabit with one of the black gods. In either case the green-haired girl with the ring through her nose is a citizen of Babylon, a nation ruled by merciless, techno-barbarian liberals and black, barbarian demigods. The European hero is a hero because he still has his spiritual resolve, his love for kith and kin. “Mock my people and my God, and I’ll strike you. Strike my kith and kin, and I’ll kill you.” That is the vow of the hero: William Tell, Alfred the Great, Robert Bruce, Henry Havelock, Charles Martel, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Andries Pretorius, and every European who love their own so much that they see His blood upon the rose.

While wandering through Britain in the early 1970s I saw an old English newsreel in an old, small town movie theater that proudly proclaimed Piccadilly, the center of London, to be the center of the civilized world. The newsreel went on to praise such stalwart Brits as Lord Wellington, Lord Nelson, and Alfred the Great. There was even great praise lavished on Andries Pretorious and Robert E. Lee as men of the heroic temper, and therefore spiritual brethren of the Brits. Such respect for the heroes of our race has completely died out. The mere mention of the fact that your heroes are antique Europeans is enough to label a man an imbecile and/or a racist. But we are a race of Scarlet Pimpernels. In fact we are the only race of people who hold the heroes of charity, the defenders and not the conquerors, to be the greatest of heroes, because they follow Him, the King and Lord of Heroes. In that hideous plastic song of the sixties, “The Age of Aquarius,” the lyrics speak of the wonders that will ensue when the stars are in alignment. The European does not care about the stars; he cares about the things of the heart. When the European’s heart is aligned with His heart, the age of the hero will return; it will be “The Age of the Man on the European White Horse,” who rides in defense of the European things, faith, hope and charity; above all charity.

I like the sagas from the Christian era that the liberals call the Dark Ages. (Of course the age when the Europeans saw the light of Christ’s love would be considered the Dark Age to liberals.) I recall one such saga from my childhood. An Icelandic warrior, newly Christianized, was in constant strife with his still pagan neighbors. The Christian Icelander called the heathen world the “twilight world” and his new-found Christian world he called the “world of light.” Every time the twilight world infringed on the Christian warrior’s world of light, he felt compelled to defend his world by driving the heathen back to their world of darkness. The task of the modern European Christian is the same as that of the Icelandic warrior. We are called upon to drive the heathen back to their world of darkness. Blackness is sacred to the liberal and the black, but it is virulent poison to the antique European, and the people who peddle it are the European’s enemies. But the psalmist assures us that He will not fail us in the day of battle.

He that dwelleth in the secret place of the most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.
I will say of the LORD, He is my refuge and my fortress: my God; in him will I trust.
Surely he shall deliver thee from the snare of the fowler, and from the noisome pestilence.
He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and buckler.
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.
A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at thy right hand; but it shall not come nigh thee. -- Psalm 91: 1-7

The hero believes that God’s word applies to him. How can we doubt it? He set His love upon our ancestors, and He will set it upon us if only we listen to and heed the wisdom of our European hearts. +

A Christian Hero

Ere I own a usurper
I’ll crouch with the fox
So tremble false whigs,
In the midst o’ your glee,
Ye have not seen the last
O’ my bonnets and me.

- Scott

The Life of Daniel Boone by Lyman C. Draper

To certain child-like men like myself (or juvenile men, if you are of a more cynical nature), who grew up with a taste for adventure tales both fiction and non-, Daniel Boone has a semi-deified status. He is the real life embodiment of Cooper’s Hawkeye (in fact, Cooper’s hero was inspired by Boone). He is chivalrous, in a rough hewn fashion, always brave and fearless in the face of danger, always calm when lesser men panic, and always in command of every situation the untamed wilderness threw at him.

The great merit of Draper’s book (written in the 1860s) is that he confirms with careful research the myth we all want to believe. Daniel Boone is everything the legends say, which makes this book a much-needed antidote to the cynical hero-debunking that takes place in virtually every ‘historical’ book that comes out today. Even Belue, who in his annoying editorial comments attempts to teach us not to condemn Indians for massacring whites, can’t really find any major errors in Draper’s biography.

Draper’s biography was never completed; it takes us up to the battle to defend Boonesborough, but there is much additional information supplied in appendices by Draper and Belue. In the opening pages of the book we also get a complete summary of the major events in Daniel Boone’s life.

Boone was born into the Quaker faith, but his Christianity was an unchurched, elemental Christianity more in tune with Alfred the Great than William Penn. Boone’s manly Christian virtues came from a deeper source than sectarian Quakerism.

Belue tells us in his introduction that Draper was no historian. He was an encyclopedist – a great collector of information. For that reason the book doesn’t read as smoothly as a modern reader might wish. One has to take one’s time, as when reading a Victorian novel. But a reader’s patience is rewarded by the many fine and splendid scenes of Daniel Boone’s life that come across to us very vividly in these pages that are only some 40 to 50 years removed from the incidents depicted.

Particularly riveting is Draper’s account of Daniel Boone’s rescue of his daughter and two other girls who had been kidnapped by Indians:

Boone and Floyd, who had now got within shooting distance, hurriedly discharged their rifles as the Indians were moving off, each mortally wounding his man. One other gun was fired a long shot probably by John McMillen, but without effect. The Indians were kindling their fire; one had been posted on the elevated grounds a little distance behind to act as a sentinel, and as the smoke ascended from the camp-fire, he left his gun and ran down to the fire to light his pipe and procure the necessary articles for mending his moccasins and was busily engaged in overhauling his budget. At the moment the whites fired upon the camp, one of the Indians was picking up wood, another preparing the meat for cooking, a third was in a reclining posture near the captives, apparently as a guard over them, while the old Cherokee chief Hanging Maw had just gone to the branch with a kettle for some water. It was the sentinel examining his budget near the fire whom Floyd wounded; he tumbled into the fire but, instantly recovering, ran off. Another, as he ran, sent his tomahawk flying at the head of Betsey Callaway, which barely missed its aim, and then, with the others, dashed into the cane and disappeared.

The girls had ventured as far back on their trail as they dared, which was but a short distance from the fire, still faintly hoping that deliverance might come, but they had become quite dispirited that day. They were sitting down on a log, Fanny Callaway on one side of her sister and Jemima Boone on the other, and both reclining their heads in her lap for rest. At the crack of the guns, the men rushed toward the camp with a loud yell, which gave the Indians no time either to kill their captives or save scarce an article of their baggage – “we sent them off,” says Floyd dryly, “almost naked.” The girls jumped instantly to their feet, Jemima Boone wildly exclaiming, “That’s daddy!”…

Jemima Boone’s cry of “That’s daddy!” brought tears to my eyes. So few captives are ever recovered from the Indians. Can you picture the anxiety of their fathers? Can you picture the fear and anxiety of the girls who were captured? “That’s daddy!” – what a wonderful moment!

And yes, Daniel Boone did indeed successfully run the gauntlet.

Running the gauntlet oftentimes resulted fatally, and particularly if the poor prisoner happened to evince a timid disposition or endeavored piteously to beg to be excused, as was frequently the case. The two lines were formed five or six feet apart on either side of the path; and once at the end, the runner was safe. The Indians were variously armed with tomahawks, clubs, sticks, and switches, and Boone stripped to his breech-cloth, leggings, and moccasins. The race commenced, when the Indians made very violent gestures as if they would knock his brains out but, after all, really appeared to show him favor, for he received only a few slight strokes from the switches. But his own shrewd management had something to do with the result, for he purposely ran in a very zig-zag manner, first making a dash so close to one side of the line as to cause the Indians suddenly to give way, and then as unexpectedly to dart in the same way to the opposite side, giving but few of them an opportunity to inflict a blow. Seeing Boone in a fair way to pass the ordeal comparatively unscathed, one fellow nearly at the farther end of the line threw himself partly within the race-path, with a view the better to give the prisoner a home thrust, but Boone appeared not to observe this maneuver and, just before reaching him, bending his head forward and increasing his speed, struck the Indian full in the breast, prostrating him instantly and running over him unharmed. This incident gave the coup de grace to the exciting ceremony and caused a perfect shout of laughter along the lines at the poor Indian’s expense, when all came up to shake hands with Boone and congratulate him on his success, complimenting him as a “vel-ly good so-jer” – and at the same time pointing to their discomfited fellow and denouncing him as a “squaw,” with a degrading prefix intended to give increased force to the epithet.

Charity never faileth, and sometimes it’s dangerous:

Near Boone’s, in the Sugar Creek Settlement, lived a noted old hunter named Tate, who spent much of his time in the woods. Boone once, returning from a hunting tour, went to his father-in-law’s, Joseph Bryan’s, to thrash out rye for his own use, and learning the wants of Tate’s family in consequence of his protracted absence, obtained permission of Mr. Bryan also to thrash out some grain for them. Such acts of charity were so common among the pioneers as scarcely to excite notice; and though they were not blazoned abroad by the adulatious newspaper puffs, they were nevertheless observed by that Good Being who assures us that while he loves a cheerful and ungrudging giver, we should never let our right hand know what our left hand doeth. On his way home with his own grain, Boone left at Tate’s what he had designed for that needy family. Returning from the wilderness, Take expressed displeasure at Boone’s generosity; and this coming to Boone’s ears and soon after meeting Tate, he gave him a severe flogging and said he would do it again should he ever throw out any more jealous intentions; that he would be grateful to any person, who under similar circumstances, would befriend his family as he had attempted to befriend Tate’s; but he could not brook the idea of real kindness being misconstrued in a manner so provokingly unkind. In his old age, Boone would sometimes allude to this instance of man’s ingratitude.

A book such as Draper’s reveals to us that the modern churchmen are lying on two essential points of European history:

1) The Europeans did not, if we look at the historical record as a whole, mistreat the indigenous
races. Quite the contrary, they acted with great forbearance and kindness toward the Indian whenever it was humanly possible. When they fought and killed Indians, it was only in order to protect their loved ones from the brutalities of a savage race of people.

2) Christianity and pacifism are not compatible. When one loves, one fights to protect the beloved. “That’s daddy!”

So long as there is one European left who still believes that Christianity is a fighting faith because the Christian god is a god of love, liberaldom will have an implacable enemy.

So Ancient and So New

“The water which has been refused to the cry of the weary and dying, is unholy, though it had been blessed by every saint in heaven; and the water which is found in the vessel of mercy is holy, though it had been defiled with corpses.” – The King of the Golden River

There are things we understand organically, things that are inside of us, and other things we can only comprehend from the outside, by observation. Let me use the example of homosexuality. When I was a young man, thankfully homosexual men were still in the closet. In fact, I don’t think in my teen years I could have given an accurate definition of a homosexual. By the time I entered my college years, however, homosexuals were being encouraged to come out of their closets, and I was then forced to acknowledge that, strange as it might seem to me, there were men who desired to be with men in the way I desired to be with women. But as a heterosexual I was not a minority of one, so I don’t recall being particularly upset that some men were not heterosexual.

It was a different case with my religious orientation. I lost and regained my childhood faith while in the belly of the beast called academia. My “teachers” undermined Christianity, but in the Library there were antique books that existed side by side with those of the despoilers. Men like Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, and Le Fanu told a different story than the philosophical speculators. My nihilism then gave way to the very elemental faith -- let’s call it the ‘Little Town of Bethlehem’ faith -- of my European ancestors. (1)

Man is a very social animal. Having come to believe in that faith which is “so ancient and so new,” I sought fellowship, not only in church but in society. And in both church and society I had to confront the fact that what I believed about God and the European culture, which showed me the face of Christ, was not the organic belief of any of my fellow Europeans.

The new Europeans had broken with the past that was the source of my new found faith. The Europeans of the older times looked on the Christian faith as an epic poem with Christ as the Hero. Through His incarnation, crucifixion, death, and resurrection, He revealed to men the humanity of God and the divine element of humanity. Man was the centerpiece of God’s creation, a personality of infinite value. But in the new Christianity, which cut across all denominational lines, Christ was the great Illuminator; He came not to set hearts on fire, but to enlighten men’s minds. The new Christianity was a mathematical system, and the elect were the men who could figure that system out.

I’ve never been able to understand, from inside, why mathematical, cosmic Christianity is more appealing to modern Europeans than the poetic, fairy tale Christianity of the Europeans of the past. But I have to acknowledge that it is because that is the faith they preach and practice.

Let’s place the faith of our European ancestors up against the faith of the modern Europeans. Our ancestors believed that heaven visited earth in the form of Jesus Christ, and through a divine act of charity He bound our hearts to His heart. All that we know of God and our fellow man comes from our hearts which He set on fire. This is why the folktales of the European people always stress the miraculous powers of a human heart that is connected to the divine heart: “Charity never faileth.”

In contrast to the way of charity, the way of the Third Dumb Brother of the European fairy tale, is a religion that exalts the superior intellect. God does not impart to human hearts, He enlightens human minds, or at least some human minds. “You too can become one of the illuminated” is the call to which modern Christians respond. And in such a religion there is no need to stay connected to a particular people’s past. In fact there is no such thing as a people, either as a group or as individuals; there is only illuminated minds connected to other illuminated minds. The white man is not committing suicide because he has lost his mind; he is committing suicide because he has lost his heart. It is in the coffin he built for the fairy tale faith of his European ancestors.

I found the folklorists of Europe left a trail of bread crumbs that led back to the cottage of the Son of God. Their apologetics of the hearth and the heart was the same as the one He used when He walked the earth. His apologetics consisted of a story about a hero (our Lord was the hero of His story) woven around dogmas illustrated by stories.

Why does the use of stories and parables mark a work as inferior apologetics and lacking in serious moral purpose? In illuminated circles such a work is labeled “natural” and thus inferior to the supernatural works of the Doctors of Theology, but by such a standard the Gospels would be considered inferior apologetics, and Christ a second-rate theologian.

The false assumption of the illuminated apologist is that reason alone stands unpolluted by original sin. This is false. Our reason is not meant to be separated from the rest of our being; it is only when we seek Christ with our heart, soul, and mind, that we can attain a vision (through a glass darkly) of the true God.

Genuine apologetics must be like the old apologetics of our Lord, showing us a vision of the true God through the use of parable, story, and the image of the Hero. When the central dogma of Christ incarnate, Christ crucified, Christ risen is still strongly present in the consciousness of the reader, the story of the Christ-like hero (such as Zorro or the Scarlet Pimpernel) is sufficient without the dogma. But when the central dogma of Western civilization has receded from the consciousness of men, the dogma must be more explicit. C. S. Lewis, in his Chronicles of Narnia, gives us the new-old apologetics for the 21st century. He makes explicit what writers such as Kenneth Grahame, Walter Scott, and Joseph Le Fanu were saying implicitly.

There will be many who will quarrel over the artistic merits of a work of literature that makes such an explicit case for the Christian Faith. But such individuals do not understand that all art is religious. There is no such thing as a work of art without a religious vision. The vision is the work of art. What makes a work of art didactic in the pejorative sense is the nature of the religious vision conveyed. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s novel, The Secret Garden, is not offensive because she writes about God; her novel is offensive because her god is a pantheistic, Buddha-type of God.

Many Catholics are particularly hostile to fairy tale apologetics. The reason Tolkien thought Narnia childish and vulgar was because he was raised in the “old” Catholic school (which was of course really a very modern school), which taught that art and religion were in separate categories, the one in the natural order, and the other in the supernatural order. But that is a false division. God does not just exist on the Mt. Sinai of the theologians, nor should apologetics be left to the professionals.

C. S. Lewis’s regress was a regress to fairy tale Christianity. After discovering the limitations of the more traditional apologetics, which he did quite well, he wrote the great work of Christian apologetics in Narnia. He broke through the Thomistic separation of the natural and the supernatural and told us a really true fairy tale of how we can learn to love God in this world and live happily ever after with Him in the next. He kept it simple for the peasants like myself, without compromising the dogma.

There is nothing written in stone that says apologetics must be dull, mathematical, unmetaphorical, unimaginative, and unintelligible. The use of parables and stories in one’s apologetics should not disqualify a work from the ranks of “serious” apologetics. In fact, it is my contention that a really effective apologia for the Faith should incorporate the heroic fairy tale traditions of Europe and the Gospels. And because our current anti-civilization does not consciously recognize the central dogma of our old civilization, the new apologetics will make it clear for whom the cross on the knight’s breastplate stands. It stands for the Christ, who was and is the source of the blood faith of the non-illuminated European people. +
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(1) There are two types of faith that I can honestly say entered my blood. The first was the fairy tale Christianity of my childhood and my adulthood, and the second was nihilism, which is more an absence of faith, of my late teens and early twenties. All other modes of thought and feeling I understand as an outside observer.

Rationalist Christianity does not move me in the slightest. Nor do the various nature religions. And neo-paganism? If man is merely a biological specimen as the neo-pagans maintain, then why should I care whether white or black vegetable matter predominates over the other? A person’s skin color matters only if his racial identity is part of his soul, which is a thing divine and which belongs to God. “Nearer My Genes to Me” is not a very inspiring hymn.

The European Past is the Present

Every Christmas I have to go through an ordeal for the sake of a few friends and relatives. What is the ordeal? Well, it is not sending out Christmas cards; I don’t mind that. And it is not wrapping presents; my wife does that. The ordeal is a trip to the Witch of Endor’s little shop of horrors.

Maybe she isn’t literally the Witch of Endor, but she gives every indication of being a near relation. The Witch of Endor is a horrible old lady who runs a local book store. Now, most people who run book stores are to the left of center, but very few would rather follow you up and down the aisles trying to interest you in the latest, radical tome from the academy than make a sale. But the Witch of Endor is such a woman. She is a retired academic who doesn’t need to make a living from selling books, so she proselytizes. And unfortunately, for me, she has the only book store that sells Dylan Thomas’s A Child’s Christmas in Wales. So if I want to give a friend or relative a copy, I must venture into the witch’s cave.

I put up with the witch for 5 straight Christmases without telling her off, and I did not refrain from speaking up because I was afraid she would cast a spell on me. I refrained because I was brought up to respect my elders, even if they weren’t my betters. This year, however, I broke down slightly. I didn’t curse at the old hag or drive a stake through her heart, but I did tell her in no uncertain terms that with the exception of certain books such as A Child’s Christmas in Wales, my reading tastes did not go past the nineteenth century. The witch then went into a witchy tirade about the evils of living in the past.

That one cannot, and should not, desire to live in the past is an unchallenged assumption of our culture. If you declared your intention to do so you would be classified as mentally unstable. But nevertheless, I would like to challenge the “You can’t live in the past” orthodoxy of our modern Babylonian culture.

In a country based solely on a materialistic view of life, such as the modern U.S.A., living in the past is viewed as insanity. How can one, outside of a science fiction novel, live in the past? One can’t in a purely material way. Even Miss Havisham could not physically stay in the past. Time moves on, as the materialists tell us ad nauseum. But time is not supreme in the spiritual realm. C. S. Lewis wisely depicts Narnia as being outside the sphere of mortal time. And Tennyson places God outside of “our bourne of Time and Place.”

Certainly a man has to acknowledge that he lives in a particular place and at a particular time, just as one must acknowledge that his earthly body needs food and sleep. But he does not have to, nor should he, live, in the spiritual sense, in a totally debased, soulless, materialistic culture. The human soul needs communion with other souls. And where there is no quickening spiritual life, there is no communion. A man must, if he has a soul, look to the past, the European past, if he wants to live a life of the spirit. The past contains all that makes life redeemable: truth, beauty, honor, love, and faith. Without a spiritual connection to the past, we are doomed to be forever bound on the Promethean rock with multi-racial birds of prey tearing at our livers.

The non-European does not have to be connected to his past in order to thrive, because the worship of dumb nature is impersonal. His ancestors worshipped the savage gods of the bush and so does he. He is connected with his ancestors in faith even if he doesn’t know them.

It is different for the white man. He turned from the nature gods to a personal God above nature. If he denies his past and seeks to return to the nature gods, he will lose his identity; he will cease to exist. The modern white liberal and his neocon cousin are perfect examples of the new, non-existent European. They deny any kinship with the Europeans of the past but are unable to return, much as they would like, to the nature gods of the barbarians. They can’t be fully barbarian because of their past, which they deny, and they can’t be fully Christian because they hate the people and the God of old Europe. So, they have become a non-people. We have only a remnant of Europeans to work with because the rest have become what is virtually a new species.

We must live in the past because that is where He lives. When Heidi’s grandfather comes down from the mountain, he finds faith and comfort with the Christian people of Dorfli. When the seven brothers, portrayed by the Finnish novelist Aleksis Kivi, come out of the forest to be reconciled with the men and women of Toukola, they find Christian men and women to be reconciled with. This is not possible in our modern world, and (what is especially sad) it is not possible in our modern churches. The Protestant and Catholic churches have divorced themselves from the past. They might retain a rite or a hymn from the past, but the spirit, the whole mode of viewing existence which marked the old European, is gone from the churches today as it is gone from the modern world.

Our European ancestors came as conquerors, but still they bent their knees to Christ. They were heroes who were not too proud to acknowledge the true Hero. How is it possible to forsake those heroes for barbarian heroes or technocratic heroes? If we align ourselves with any part of the modern world, we will surely die.

The immortal part of man, his spirit, cannot live with the barbarian or the technocrat. In the past, which is always spiritually in the present, is life, abundant life. Nothing is impossible if we stay linked to the European past. One of my heroes, Sir Walter Scott, once wrote a short novel called the The Surgeon’s Daughter. The young surgeon’s daughter has the misfortune to be captured by Moslems. One man loves her enough to face the entire Moslem world alone, armed only with his love and his faith:

‘Twas the hour when rites unholy
Call’d each Paynim voice to prayer,
And the star that faded slowly,
Left to dews the freshen’d air.

Day his sultry fires had wasted,
Calm and cool the moonbeams shone;
To the Vizier’s lofty palace
One bold Christian came alone.

I quote those lines often because I think they express what sets the European apart from all other races. Because he bent his knee, unreservedly, without let or hindrance, to Christ, he was able to understand the miracle of love. The European saw that human love and divine love were intertwined and that the type of miracle which confounds the devil and defeats the evil empires of this world comes only to those whose love is grounded in Him, who is to be found in the European past. If we refuse to sever our link to that past, we will never be bereft of those things the modern world is bereft of: faith, hope, and charity.

The Sacred Heritage

"It is not much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart."

When a man is healthy, he doesn't spend a lot of time pondering his health, but when he is sick he does think about his health. How sick am I? How did I get sick? What will it take for me to recover?

European civilization is sick, and I have spent the greater part of my adult life contemplating its sickness. I have felt for a number of years now that I know the cause of its sickness. In various articles such as "Only My Blood Speaks," The Poetic Core of Western Civilization, and The Lost Thread, I have attempted to expose the serpent that has entwined itself around Europe. That serpent is philosophical speculation. What the philosophical speculators bring to Christianity is a "hedge your bets" type of strategy: "Christ is risen… maybe, but in case He isn't, let's make sure we have a philosophical system to fall back on."

Christianity, however, is not a faith that permits that kind of dualism. When philosophy and Christianity are joined, there is a diminished sense of man's sin and man's need for a loving savior. Sin becomes something that can be cured by the proper use of man's reason. And when sin can be cured by rationality, there is a loss of the tragic sense of life. If the world is ordered so marvelously with pat answers for every contingency of existence, what need is there for the Suffering Servant?

Christianity is a religion of depth. If the riddle of existence can be solved by an encyclopedic knowledge of the natural world, then we need only consult with the men who possess that knowledge; we do not have to plumb the depths in search of a Savior who speaks to us from the depths.

It is to the Europeans that we must turn for a vision of the true God. Their gods were hero-gods. They couldn't conceive of a god in any other form, and when they were told the story of the ultimate Hero-God, they embraced Him. But unfortunately, the transmission of Christianity via the Romans was a mixed blessing. The Europeans heard the story of the great Hero-God, but with that story came the serpent of philosophical speculation. The Greco-Romans had rejected the vision of their bards, such as Sophocles and Virgil, who saw that only a Hero above the nature gods could save man. Instead the Greco-Romans placed their faith in those men who professed to have found the secret of the universe in the mind, and not the heart, of man. They came as missionaries and teachers, but what their convertites and pupils brought to the faith, a realization that Christ was the Hero-God, was of infinite value. If the intellectual elite of the Roman Church had had the humility to learn from their pupils, the division of Christendom could have been prevented. For what was the Protestant Reformation in essence but an attempt by the Northern Europeans (minus Ireland) to reclaim that vision of the Hero-God free from the serpentine entanglements of the philosophers?

But of course a movement that is only a desperate gasp for life can be easily subverted. The same serpent of philosophical speculation that had entwined itself around the Roman Church entwined itself around the Protestant church as well.

The tragic Christ, the heroic Christ of St. Paul, of Isaiah, was the Christ who the 'primitive' Europeans saw when they embraced Christianity. And we need their dauntless spirits if we are to reclaim the true Europe. Noble hearts must respond directly to His heart. "Now his good sword he has drawn; And he has thrown the sheath away," was the war cry of the old Europeans as they joined their Lord in His battle against Satan. It must once again be our war cry.

The current breed of post-Christians are the bastard children of the illicit union of Christianity and speculative philosophy. They have the outward features of human beings, but they have lost touch with the spiritual wellspring of life. Inside they are dead. So they look for renewal from the barbarian races. "They will provide the blood and spirit we lack." But that will never be. The blood cannot function without the spirit or the spirit without the blood. The barbarians lack the spirit while the post-Christians lack the blood. There is nothing vital in barbarism or post-Christianity. True vitality comes not from the bloodless faith of the philosophical speculators or from the blood-without-spirit faith of the barbarians. True faith comes only from the spirit-infused blood that once belonged to the European.

When the vision is blurred because we attempt to see existence with the eye of the philosopher rather than through the eye of the bard, we kill the blood and eviscerate the spirit. But the eviscerated faith of the modern philosopher is presented to us as a higher faith. All my life I have heard the same propaganda: "There is primitive man who fears lightning and is superstitious. Then there is the man who believes in a human God with a slightly higher ethical code than primitive man. And then there is intellectual man who knows all Gods are just manifestations of the human mind, which is the true God."

The ruling elite in church and society actually believe that they have achieved the highest stage of existence. They worship the great universal mind that is beyond the gods of the pagans and the God of the Christian. Because the fact of modern man's exalted state, by virtue of his elevated "intellectual" notions of God, is such a given to the post-Christian of the 20th and 21st centuries, we need to go back to the 19th century to see a different vision of God.

The great poets and novelists do not just give us their personal visions; they also give us a glimpse of the spiritual under-girding of the society in which they live. And what we see in the late 1700's through the 1800's and into the early 1900's is a titanic struggle for the soul of Europe. The satanic serpent of philosophical speculation finally decided that he no longer needed to slither on his belly and take people by surprise. He could now stand upright and enjoy the fruits of years of slithering, philosophical speculation: Darwinism, capitalism, communism, science and psychology were all creations of the speculating serpent. But there was also a heroic response. European man was not dead yet. An enormous amount of writers saw through the myth of the "higher stage of existence" and threw in their lot with the God-Man. Surely their journeys also reflected the spiritual journeys of many of their countrymen.

With most of the writers, excepting Walter Scott, the post-Christian consciousness was not something they merely observed in others; it was part of their soul. But they, the great ones, fought against it and tried to reclaim the integral vision of the God-Man. Such a vision belongs in the speculators' second stage of existence, but is in reality the only real stage of existence for a truly Christian and truly European man.

The list of knights errant who made the great refusal is very long (see "The Nineteenth Century Way to God"), but I will limit my discussion here to five men: Walter Scott, Thomas Hughes, J. S. Le Fanu, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Ian McClaren.

Walter Scott
With a great many writers it is necessary to forgive much in their personal lives. And that is fair. We are all sinners, and if an author has shown us a glimpse of the eternal through his writings we should mercifully place a veil over his private failings. I know I don't want to hear anything about the personal life of an author I admire unless it is something laudatory. But of course there is always somebody who will take delight in bringing your hero down to earth. "Dickens wrote all those books about happy Victorian families, while he was …." You know that type of debunker. I despise that type of attack even when used against an author I don't like. The E. Michael Jones School of Literary Criticism disgusts me. But such critics we will always have with us. Which is why I take particular delight in their inability to lay a glove on one of my heroes, Sir Walter Scott. H. V. Morton says this about him in his book, In Scotland Again: "It is a commonplace that we who come after must forgive many a man for his sins because he was a great artist. Scott needs no forgiveness. He was a perfect man." Any discussion of a European comeback must begin with Sir Walter Scott.

Scott saw the beginning of the post-Christian stage of European man. But it was never part of his soul. He did not have to fight, like Dostoyevsky, with the demons that were within and without. He was the last thoroughly European writer. Christianity for Scott was not a philosophy from which one could take a few maxims to live by. Christianity was that inextinguishable flame that distinguished the European hearth fire from every other hearth fire. Scott's contempt for the fanatics of every denomination was rooted in a respect, nay a reverence, for the Man of Sorrows. And because of this reverence, Scott loved the continent that nurtured and protected the story of the heroic God-Man. He saw in the new world of industrialism and commerce the victory of the serpent. In all of his literary romances he sets the spirit of European chivalry against the speculative serpent. And it is a chivalry that has been shorn of its medieval formalism. It is not the outward, warlike chivalry of the Knights Templar but is instead a deeper chivalry of the heart. A spindly-legged clergyman such as Reuben Butler can practice it just as intensely as a knight like Quentin Durward.

Scott was a conservative of the blood and spirit. He sensed that the ancient ways were best because they were closer to Him. And he did not equate old Europe with one Christian denomination or one political party or one social structure. In Scott's view, what distinguished the old European man from the new breed of European intellectuals was the old Europeans' disdain for abstract reason divorced from the common experience of the European man of flesh and blood. The European everyman did not need to theorize; he knew in his blood, infused with the blood and spirit of the God-Man, what was the best way to live.

An established system is not to be tried by those tests which may with perfect correctness be applied to a new theory. A civilized nation, long in possession of a code of law, under which, with all its inconveniences, they have found means to flourish, is not to be regarded as an infant colony, on which experiments in legislation may, without much danger of presumption, be hazarded. A philosopher is not entitled to investigate such a system by those ideas which he has fixed in his own mind as the standard of possible excellence. The only unerring test of every old establishment is the effect it has actually produced, for that must be held to be good, from whence good is derived. The people have, by degrees, moulded their habits to the law they are compelled to obey; for some of its imperfections remedies have been found, to others they have reconciled themselves; till, at last, they have, from various causes, attained the object which the most sanguine visionary could promise to himself from his own perfect unembodied system.

from Scott's "Essay on Judicial Reform" quoted in John Gibson Lockhart's Memoirs
of the Life of Scott

Scott completely rejected the "higher stage of development" theories of the new breed of European intellectuals. In his world there was no such thing as a perfect system that could transcend Christianity. His God was always Christ, the Hero-God of the Europeans.

In the introduction to his masterpiece, Uncle Silas, J. S. LeFanu says that he tried to write in the spirit of Sir Walter Scott. He succeeds. The character for whom LeFanu's novel is named is the embodiment of the post-Christian man. He knows, intellectually, what Christianity is, so he can talk and behave like a Christian. But in reality he is a believer in the "higher" religion. The Hero-God that speaks to human hearts does not inspire him because he has no heart that can be set aflame.

Of my wretched uncle's religion what am I to say? Was it utter hypocrisy, or had it at any time a vein of sincerity in it? I cannot say. I don't believe that he had any heart left for religion, which is the highest form of affection, to take hold of. Perhaps he was a sceptic with misgivings about the future, but past the time for finding anything reliable in it. The devil approached the citadel of his heart by stealth, with many zigzags and parallels. The idea of marrying me to his son by fair means, then by foul, and, when that wicked chance was gone, then the design of seizing all by murder, supervened. I dare say that Uncle Silas thought for a while that he was a righteous man. He wished to have heaven and to escape hell, if there were such places. But there were other things whose existence was not speculative, of which some he coveted, and some he dreaded more, and temptation came. 'Now if any man build upon this foundation, gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, stubble, every man's work shall be made manifest; for the day shall declare it, because it shall be revealed by fire; and the fire shall try every man's work of what sort it is.' There comes with old age a time when the heart is no longer fusible or malleable, and must retain the form in which it has cooled down. 'He that is unjust, let him be unjust still; he which is filthy, let him be filthy still.'

The heroine, Maud Ruthyn, seems helpless against the ruthless Uncle Silas. But she is saved, not by her intellect, but by her innocence and the grace of God. In a marvelous denouement, LeFanu depicts the working of grace in a character who we would not have suspected of being receptive to God's grace. But Maud's innocence inspires him. He becomes a hero in spite of himself.

So it was vain: I was trapped, and all was over.

I stood before him on the step, the white moon shining on my face. I was trembling so that I wonder I could stand, my helpless hands raised towards him, and I looked up in his face. A long shuddering moan—'Oh—oh—oh!' was all I uttered.

The man, still holding my arm, looked, I thought frightened, into my white dumb face.

Suddenly he said, in a wild, fierce whisper—

'Never say another word' (I had not uttered one). 'They shan't hurt ye, Miss; git ye in; I don't care a damn!'

It was an uncouth speech. To me it was the voice of an angel. With a burst of gratitude that sounded in my own ears like a laugh, I thanked God for those blessed words.

LeFanu saw that the new Europe of science and rationalism was not going to produce a new golden age; it was going to produce inhuman men like Uncle Silas. Only the God-Man, pure and unadulterated by rationalism and science, could prevail against the Uncle Silases of the new Europe.

It is not easy to recall in calm and happy hours the sensations of an acute sorrow that is past. Nothing, by the merciful ordinance of God, is more difficult to remember than pain. One or two great agonies of that time I do remember, and they remain to testify of the rest, and convince me, though I can see it no more, how terrible all that period was.

Next day was the funeral, that appalling necessity; smuggled away in whispers, by black familiars, unresisting, the beloved one leaves home, without a farewell, to darken those doors no more; henceforward to lie outside, far away, and forsaken, through the drowsy heats of summer, through days of snow and nights of tempest, without light of warmth, without a voice near. Oh, Death, king of terrors! The body quakes and the spirit faints before thee. It is vain, with hands clasped over our eyes, to scream our reclamation; the horrible image will not be excluded. We have just the word spoken eighteen hundred years ago, and our trembling faith. And through the broken vault the gleam of the Star of Bethlehem.

Let me just add before leaving LeFanu that I think his Maud Ruthyn and Scott's Jeanie Deans are the two greatest heroines in English literature.

Thomas Hughes
Thomas Hughes' magnificent work, Tom Brown's School Days, and the sequel, Tom Brown at Oxford, deserve to be placed in the topmost rank of English literature, but they are not placed there because they are so unabashedly Christian. There are three aspects to Hughes' Christianity. The first is charity. In this he is like so many of his 19th century contemporaries. They saw St. Paul's meditation on charity (1 Corinthians 13) as the very essence of Christianity. We know Tom Brown will never go too far astray when we see how he takes care of "little Arthur."

On went the talk and laughter. Arthur finished his washing and undressing, and put on his night-gown. He then looked round more nervously than ever. Two or three of the little boys were already in bed, sitting up with their chins on their knees. The light burned clear, the noise went on. It was a trying moment for the poor little lonely boy; however, this time he didn't ask Tom what he might or might not do, but dropped on his knees by his bedside, as he had done every day from his childhood, to open his heart to him who heareth the cry and beareth the sorrows of the tender child, and the strong man in agony.

Tom was sitting at the bottom of this bed unlacing his boots, so that his back was toward Arthur, and he didn't see what happened, and looked up in wonder at the sudden silence. Then two or three boys laughed and sneered, and a big brutal fellow, who was standing in the middle of the room, picked up a slipper, and shied it at the kneeling boy, calling him a sniveling young shaver. Then Tom saw the whole, and the next moment the boot he had just pulled off flew straight at the head of the bully, who had just time to throw up his arm and catch it on his elbow.

"Confound you, Brown, what's that for?" roared he, stamping with pain.

"Never mind what I mean," said Tom, stepping on to the floor, every drop of blood in his body tingling; "if any fellow wants the other boot, he knows how to get it."

The second part of Hughes' vision is implicit in most of the 19th century authors, but Brown makes it explicit, which is unique. Hughes places before us the vital connection between a belief in heroes and faith in the Hero-God. In doing this, he shows us the reason our European ancestors were able to see that Christ the Hero, whose reflection they saw in the faces of their warrior-hero gods, was the true Hero God.

And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb
and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of whom it speaks. Such stages
have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win
their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the King and Lord
of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through
the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through
the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that
we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness,
and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these
dwell forever and ever in perfect fullness.

And thirdly, Hughes sees, in contrast to virtually every other European of that era or subsequent eras, the limitations of Greek philosophy:

The result of Hardy's management was that Tom made a clean breast of it, telling everything, down to his night at the ragged school, and what an effect his chance opening of the "Apology" had had on him. Here for the first time Hardy came in with his usual dry, keen voice, "You needn't have gone so far back as Plato for that lesson."

"I don't understand," said Tom.

"Well, there's something about an indwelling spirit which guideth every man, in St. Paul, isn't there?"

"Yes, a great deal," Tom answered, after a pause; "but it isn't the same thing."

"Why not the same thing?"

"Oh, surely, you must feel it. It would be almost blasphemy in us now to talk as St. Paul talked. It is much easier to face the notion, or the fact, of a demon or spirit such as Socrates felt to be in him, than to face what St. Paul seems to be meaning."

"Yes, much easier. The only question is whether we will be heathen or not."

"How do you mean?" said Tom.

"Why, a spirit was speaking to Socrates, and guiding him. He obeyed the guidance, but knew not whence it came. A spirit is striving with us too, and trying to guide us--we feel that just as much as he did. Do we know what spirit it is? Whence it comes? Will we obey it? If we can't name it—know no more of it then he knew about his demon, of course, we are in no better position than he--in fact, heathens."

Robert Louis Stevenson
Robert Louis Stevenson is rightly revered for his A Child's Garden of Verses, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped. But the Stevenson canon contains much more. He was one of the greats, who was brought up to revere the third, 'higher' stage of existence, but who rejected it for the second, Christian-fairy tale stage of existence.

In Ebb Tide, we meet a man who has reconverted. He was a man of the mind, but he returns to Christian orthodoxy. It is significant that in the two movie versions of Ebb Tide, the Christian reconvertite is depicted as a madman. Why, of course. How could a man exposed to the wonders of the 'higher' religion of the mind return to a Crude Fairy Tale? But Attwater does reject the new faith. And his unflinching orthodoxy brings another sinner into the fold: "That's just the one thing wanted; just say, 'Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief! And He'll fold you in His arms. You see, I know! I've been a sinner myself!"

It doesn't matter whether a great poet comes from a Catholic or a Protestant background; he always sees that the Christian faith cannot be made into a philosophy. It must always be a faith, with God and the devil warring for the soul of man. Stevenson, in Thrawn Janet, gives us a wonderful glimpse of the on-going war between God and the devil. And he makes it clear that a man who has one foot in the third stage of the 'higher' religion and one foot in the Christian stage cannot cope with the devil.

The Reverend Murdoch Soulis seemed like a good young man when he first came into Balweary, but he was "fu' o' book learnin' and grand at the exposition, but as was natural in sae young a man, wi' nae leevin' experience in religion… There was no doubt onyway, but that Mr. Soulis had been ower lang at the college."

Murdoch is not in the final stage when he comes to Balweary. He has only been flirting with it. When he encounters evil incarnate, he is driven back to orthodoxy.

"Witch, heldame, devil!" he cried, "I charge you by the power of God, begone — if you be dead, to the grave — if you be damned, to hell."

And for the rest of his life, the Rev. Murdoch Soulis never again flirted with the third stage of religion.

Ian Maclaren
In the 1890's two novels appeared that stand as a final testament to the faith of the European peoples. In Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush and its sequel, The Days of Auld Lang Syne, John Watson (pen name, Ian Maclaren) sets before us an image of Christ that is beyond creed, it is pure unadulterated vision. Our hearts burn within us when reading the Drumtochty novels, and we feel with absolute certainty that "this is Christianity and these people are the true Europeans."

Watson places us in the town of Drumtochty where there are two Presbyterian kirks, the Free Kirk and the established Kirk. But it is not Calvinism that dominates the hearts and minds of the people of Drumtochty. It is Christ. Before there was an Aquinas, before there was a Calvin, there was the Savior.

The town of Drumtochty is a bit of a throwback; there is no one in the town who has completely gone over to the third stage of religion. But there are some who are in danger. And they are brought back to the fold by other Drumtochtians who can see His blood on the bonnie brier bush. One such individual is the local Dominie who has made a whited sepulcher of the Greek classics. As his prize pupil lies dying, he realizes that it was the pupil who was the true teacher:

"Maister Jamieson, ye hae been a gude freend tae me, the best I ever hed aifter my mither and faither. Wull ye tak this buik for a keepsake o' yir grateful scholar? It's a Latin 'Imitation' Dominie, and it's bonnie printin'. Ye mind hoo ye gave me yir ain Virgil, and said he was a kind o' Pagan sanct. Noo here is my sanct, and div ye ken I've often thocht Virgil saw His day afar off, and was glad. Wull ye read it, Dominie, for my sake, and maybe ye 'ill come to see--" and George could not find words for more.

But Domsie understood. "Ma laddie, ma laddie, that I luve better than onythin' on earth, I'll read it till I die, and, George, I'll tell ye what livin' man does na ken. When I was your verra age I had a cruel trial, and ma heart was turned frae faith. The classics hae been my bible, though I said naethin' to ony man against Christ. He aye seemed beyond man, and noo the veesion o' Him has come to me in this gairden. Laddie, ye hae dune far mair for me than I ever did for you. Wull ye mak a prayer for yir auld dominie afore we pairt?"

There was a thrush singing in the birches and a sound of bees in the air, when George prayed in a low, soft voice, with a little break in it.

"Lord Jesus, remember my dear maister, for he's been a kind freend to me and mony a puir laddie in Drumtochty. Bind up his sair heart and give him licht at eventide, and may the maister and his scholars meet some mornin' where the schule never skails, in the kingdom o' oor Father."

Twice Domsie said Amen, and it seemed as the voice of another man, and then he kissed George upon the forehead; but what they said Marget did not wish to hear.

When he passed out at the garden gate, the westering sun was shining golden, and the face of Domsie was like unto that of a little child.

Yes, "like unto that of a little child." When the Europeans bent their knees to Christ they did so with the faith that was like unto that of a little child. It took centuries for them to become too adult and too intelligent to believe in a fairy story about a heroic God who was God and man.

Drumtochty gets into a man's soul. Once he's been exposed to the town, he can never really leave it. There is something about that town that is antithetical to those who stand poised between Christianity and the 'higher' stage. One young minister is in danger, when his dead Mother's words come back to him.

He had finished its last page with honest pride that afternoon, and had declaimed it, facing the southern window, with a success that amazed himself. His hope was that he might be kept humble, and not called to Edinburgh for at least two years; and now he lifted the sheets with fear. The brilliant opening, with its historical parallel, this review of modern thought reinforced by telling quotations, that trenchant criticism of old-fashioned views, would not deliver. For the audience had vanished, and left one careworn, but ever beautiful face, whose gentle eyes were waiting with a yearning look. Twice he crushed the sermon in his hands, and turned to the fire his aunt's care had kindled, and twice he repented and smoothed it out. What else could he say now to the people? and then in the stillness of the room he heard a voice, "Speak a
gude word for Jesus Christ."

Next minute he was kneeling on the hearth, and pressing the magnum opus, that was to shake Drumtochty, into the heart of the red fire, and he saw, half-smiling and half-weeping, the impressive words, "Semitic environment," shrivel up and disappear.

As the last black flake fluttered out of sight, the face looked at him again, but this time the sweet brown eyes were full of peace.

It was no masterpiece, but only the crude production of a lad who knew little of letters and nothing of the world. Very likely it would have done neither harm nor good, but it was his best, and he gave it for love's sake, and I suppose that there is nothing in a human life so precious to God, neither clever words nor famous deeds, as the sacrifices of love.

The moon flooded his bedroom with silver light, and he felt the presence of his mother. His bed stood ghostly with its white curtains, and he remembered how every night his mother knelt by its side in prayer for him. He is a boy once more, and repeats theLord's Prayer, then he cries again, "My mother! my mother!" and an indescribable contentment fills his heart.

These short glimpses of the 19th century counterattack do not do justice to the depth and breadth of the resistance. But they do reveal to us the essential touchstone of reality: Men and women of depth, when faced with the tragedy of existence (often brought home to them by satanic 'isms' such as capitalism and communism), return to a Christ-centered Christianity. The philosophical Christ, the theological Christ, is not sufficient. They instinctively know that they need a hero, not a sage. They need the God-Man. They knew it; we don't. That's why there is a chasm between our culture and the 19th century European culture. However, the chasm is not impassable. We simply need to recapture the same spirit as the early Europeans:

The Son of God goes forth to war
A kingly crown to gain;
His blood red banner streams afar:
Who follows in His train?

That Within Which Passeth Show

Suspend for the duration all your preconceived notions about Shakespeare received from literary critics and journalists. To understand a real poet, you must strip away all the layers of sludge from around your heart and let it respond to the poet. If we truly have souls, then we have a genuine heart, perhaps unknown to us, that can hear the poetic muse.

Let us meet the poet: he sees, not in a purely rational or clairvoyant sense, but in an intuitive poetic sense, that he stands on the threshold of a new world. This new world is not a better world. It is a world split apart by the Aristotleian-Thomistic separation of reason from grace. And the Protestant reaction to the break has not put the splintered wreck of the faith back together again. Henceforward, that pernicious heresy of the intellect divorced from the heart, the Gnostic heresy, would be a force to be reckoned with.

The poet saw the new force corrupting all of Europe. He saw a new Christianity, crafted onto the old Christianity. This new Christianity, spawned from the isolated intellect, was of necessity a dialectical faith. It set husband against wife, brother against brother, reason against grace, clergy against layman, and the heart against the intellect. In short, the poet saw the complete dislocation of man from the life of God. God would henceforth exist only as an intellectual construct. Man was on his own, left to intellectually conjugate God, but doomed never to know Him again.

But the Bard knew God. Giving his hero the name of his dead son, who was living (he firmly believed) in the arms of his Lord, the Bard launched Hamlet into the world to attack the Gnosticism of the new religion. But he wanted his hero to be a real hero. He wanted his hero to face the heresy of the age and of the future and to defeat that heresy.

Hamlet comes from the University, where students regularly have their heads severed from their hearts and souls. He suffers from the Gnostic disease himself and seems to be at a loss as to how to deal with the ill tidings he has received from his father's ghost. He is scared, confused, and angry. He is out of joint and not capable, as he acknowledges – "Oh cursed spite" – of setting things right.

But by the end of the play he does set things right. How? Because Hamlet loves. If one looks only at external events, Hamlet is a murderer, a usurper, and a cad who drives a young woman to suicide. But we who have followed Hamlet through the maze know differently. Hamlet loved his noble father; those pseudo-theologians who tell us that Hamlet is damned for following the vengeful dictates of his father fail to see how the Ghost's injunctions differ from mere pagan blood-letting ("Leave her to heaven") just as they fail to see how nature and grace blend together in a Christian soul.

Likewise Hamlet loves his mother in more than just the Freudian sense. And Ophelia? Is it possible to doubt that he loved her? No! It is at Ophelia's grave that Hamlet finally puts his own fragmented soul together: "This is I, Hamlet the Dane."

And when Hamlet walks out alone to fight a duel that he knows will mean death, he does so because he accepts that --

[T]there's a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now, yet it will come: the readiness is all: since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.

The reason Hamlet has held such fascination over the years for the general audience and for the literary critic is that he is the first stage hero to confront modernity. Thus the literary critic will delight in dissecting the 'sicko' who defies modernity, and the base, common populace will champion or condemn Hamlet depending on how far down the modern slope they have traveled.
But let us not have any doubt that it is modernity which Hamlet confronts in the person of Claudius. Claudius is the post-Christian man, the precursor of the anti-Christ. He knows the ways of God, he can ape the good well enough to fool even the elect, but his heart and soul are at the service of the devil.

It is significant that Hamlet, who is a genius, cannot move successfully against Claudius until he ceases to try to combat him with only his own genius. When he gives himself up to Divine Providence and acts in the fullness of his personality as King and son, he defeats Claudius. And between his discovery of his uncles' treachery and his death, Hamlet gives us the definitive refutation of modernity. Remember when Rosencrantz and Guildendstern, acting for Claudius, try to exploit their former friendship with Hamlet in order to "pluck out the heart of his mystery"? Hamlet finds them out with ease and speaks not only to them, but to Claudius and all psychotherapists, neoclassicists, formalist theologians, and Gnostics of the modern world when he enjoins them to "play upon the pipe."

Hamlet. Will you play upon this Pipe?

Guildenstern. My Lord, I cannot.

Ham. I pray you.

Guild. Believe me, I cannot.

Ham. I do beseech you.

Guild. I know no touch of it, my Lord.

Ham. 'Tis as easy as lying: govern these ventages with your finger and thumb, give it breath with your mouth, and it will discourse most excellent Music. Look you, these are the stops.

Guild. But these cannot I command to any utterance of harmony, I have not the skill.

Ham. Why look you now, how unworthy a thing you make of me: you would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops: you would pluck out the heart of my
Mystery; you would sound me from my lowest Note, to the top of my Compass: and
there is much Music, excellent Voice, in this little Organ, yet cannot you make it. Why do you think, that I am easier to be play'd on than a Pipe? Call me what
Instrument you will, though you can fret me, you cannot play upon me.

Yes, only the heart can know the mystery of another heart. To the intellect alone, the heart remains an enigma. Horatio, whose philosophy is inadequate, still has enough heart to pronounce the correct benediction for his friend and King.

Now cracks a noble heart. –good night, sweet prince;And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!—

Shakespeare sets the stage for us. The Gnostics will always be at war with the God-Man. They hate, like Satan, anything that is tainted with humanity. So above all, they hate the Incarnation and the civilization that placed the Incarnate God at its center. What Shakespeare tells us in the conflict between Claudius and Hamlet is that we cannot defeat the Claudiuses of the world if we are like unto them. It cannot be brain against brain, Moriarity against Holmes. It must be the integral, heroic man of heart and blood against the disembodied, heartless, bloodless villain – it must be Hamlet vs. Claudius, Tell vs. Gessler, Bulldog Drummond vs. Peterson, and the Scarlet Pimpernel vs. Chauvelin.

The bloodless, chestless men will always be with us. They are the waste products of a Christian civilization; but they should not be at the center of our culture. It is the duty of white Europeans to push them back to the dark fringes of civilization.

Hamlet curses the day that he was "born to set it right." But he ultimately accepts his destiny and he does set it right. The white European hero culture is Hamlet's culture. It is our culture, and it is His culture. We are called to defend it against the white technocrat, the colored hordes, and against all the forces of hell.