The European Garden

For the Glory of the Garden, that it may not pass away!
And the Glory of the Garden it shall never pass away!

-Rudyard Kipling

I once attended a parent-teacher meeting, during which a father defended his son’s spitting in the classroom by saying that nowhere in the students’ manual was there any rule against spitting in the classroom. I responded to the father by saying that the student manual did not specifically forbid urinating in the classroom either, but nevertheless students were expected to refrain from that practice. Of course the whole conversation was ridiculous. When the common thread of a shared religious heritage and the code of conduct that came from that heritage is lost, there is no point in screaming across the chasm that divides an antique faith from an ultra modern faith.

There has been a revolution in Europe, a revolution that was brewing for centuries, which has come to fruition in the last fifty years. The new religion has its own inquisition -- all religions do -- and its own set of laws, unwritten and written. What is truly amazing to me is the great number, an overwhelming majority, of Europeans who have complied so willingly with the tenets of the new religion. Let’s be clear about what the old religion was and what the new religion is. The old religion ‘was bred in the bone’ Christianity. The new religion is ‘bred in the mind,’ propositional Christianity, which is called liberalism. There are some Europeans who want to fuse the old Christianity with liberalism; I call such people halfway-house Christians, but can the devil be wedded to Christ? Such a blasphemy can never be sanctioned. The halfway-house Christians are in league with the liberals.

There are millions of liberal tomes in the workplace, the church, and the university that tell us about the necessity of diversity and the dangers of white supremacy, but let’s go to the heart of the matter: the new religion has two commandments from which all the voluminous tomes of liberal minutiae stem:

I. Thou shalt love the black man with all thy heart, mind, and soul.
II. Thou shalt hate the white man with all thy heart, mind, and soul.

On these two commandments rest all the laws of Liberaldom. And the laws of Liberaldom are satanic. It is the duty of European Christians of the old stock to destroy Liberaldom. It’s not the work of a day, but the destruction of Liberaldom begins with the European who countermands the two commandments of Liberaldom. He must hate the blasphemy of Negro worship with all his heart, mind, and soul, and he must love his kith, kin, and God with all his heart, mind, and soul. Please note that the white Christian’s hate is not like unto the hate of the liberal and the black barbarian. The white Christian hates the works of the devil, and Negro worship is the work of the devil, but the Christian’s hate, though more passionate than the liberal’s and the barbarian’s because it comes from the depths of his soul, is of a different kind than the liberal’s or the barbarian’s. It is a hate that stems from love – love of one’s kith and kin who have been condemned to die at the hands of the liberal-backed barbarians, and the love of the God who enjoined us to fight against the devil and all his minions.

In contrast to the white European, the liberal and the barbarian hate for the sake of hating, just as the followers of Kali kill not in defense of, but for the sake of killing. The white man’s task then is to set himself in defiance of those two commandments of Liberaldom.

To date there have been no battles between the Europeans and the liberals. There have only been a series of surrenders by the Europeans. It seems apparent that white Europeans have been overawed by the new faith of the liberals. Why should this be? I can only conclude that there are very few antique Europeans left, which seems incredible; such a glorious heritage -- how could the Europeans renounce it? St. Paul and Shakespeare give us the answer: Reality is unbearable without faith in Christ. Every religion, save the Christian religion, is based on a flight from reality. The barbarians flee from reality in the cults of blood and sex. The more philosophically inclined escape reality in the abstraction philosophies, such as stoicism, Buddhism, and Thomism, that bid us divorce ourselves from humanity because any in-depth contact with humanity is painful. I always keep the pages in Scott’s The Antiquary marked, in which the young hero castigates the divorced-from-humanity theologians:

“We harden ourselves in vain,” continued the Antiquary, pursuing his own train of thought and feeling—“We harden ourselves in vain to treat with the indifference they deserve the changes of this trumpery whirligig world—We strive ineffectually to be the self-sufficing invulnerable being, the teres atque rotundus of the poet—the stoical exemption which philosophy affects to give us over the pains and vexations of human life, is as imaginary as the state of mystical quietism and perfection aimed at by some crazy enthusiasts.”

“And Heaven forbid that it should be otherwise!” said Lovel warmly—“Heaven forbid that any process of philosophy were capable so to sear and indurate our feelings, that nothing should agitate them but what arose instantly and immediately out of our own selfish interests!—I would as soon wish my hand to be as callous as horn, that it might escape an occasional cut or scratch, as I would be ambitious of the stoicism which should render my heart like a piece of the nether mill-stone.”

Isn’t that what the modern European has done, rendered his heart like a piece of the nether mill-stone in order to escape pain? Yes, he has. And he has done the stoic, the Buddhist, and the Thomist one better; he has syncretized abstracted indifferentism with the sex and blood cults of the barbarians. “Divorce oneself from the true God and His people, and then plunge into the blood and sex cults of the barbarians, of which the Negro is the lodestar.” That is the vaunted new religion, blending two very old pagan religions. There is no love, no spiritual passion, and no charity in the new, liberal, syncretized faith, because things of the spirit that cause pain have been eliminated from Liberaldom. The “heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” comes from an excess of love. If a man severs his emotional ties to his kith and kin and the personal god who created man in His image, or if he sees all mankind as part of a Babylonian blood and sex orgy, he will be able to bypass the pain that comes from having a heart of flesh and blood, but he will have ceased to be human.

There are certainly phony declarations of love in the new religion, but there is no genuine love. Does the liberal love the black god whom he worships? No, the liberal loves his own abstracted image of the black man. Does the black man love the liberal? The question is ludicrous. The black man despises the white liberal. What then is the essence of Liberaldom? It is hatred of humanity and the humane God, because humanity, in the liberal’s eyes, is pain, unremitting pain without end, because the liberal thinks no redeemer liveth, and no redeemer will raise him from the dead. Hence, the liberal must join with the colored hordes to kill the white man, who would force him to look at the Gorgon’s head of death.

The essential difference between the antique Europeans and the non-Europeans is revealed in their reactions to the Gorgon’s head of death. The non-European cannot look at the death’s head without being anesthetized by sex and blood or abstracted from it by a theology of negation. In contrast to the non-European, the antique European believes that Jesus Christ, the man of sorrows, looked at the Gorgon’s head and lived. “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

The European must be prepared to go it alone against the liberal–barbarian dragon. There is no guarantee that any other Europeans will join with him in the battle, but there is a possibility that others will follow once they see that accusations of “white supremacy” and demands for “diversity” are ploys of the devil which he uses to unman Christian Europeans. The man blind from birth in the Gospels, to whom Christ gave sight, did not at first see with blinding sight. Christ told him, “Go wash in the pool of Siloam.” After he washed in the pool, he saw things clearly. It’s always about vision, which comes from the heart. The blind man receives his sight after washing in the pool of Siloam, because he already had seen the Son of God in his heart.

There are Europeans who occasionally get a glimpse of the horror of the new faith, but they shrink from the horror and take refuge in lies. I recall an incident, all too typical, at a college where I was working. A black administrator had come out and found the word “nigger” spray- painted on her car. Of course the F.B.I. was brought in and every man, woman, and child on campus was questioned. In addition everyone employed by the college was forced to take a course in “diversity.” And the classes were not cancelled when it was discovered that the incompetent black administrator had spray-painted the word “nigger” on her own car. Nor was the black administrator disciplined by the university or charged with a crime by the police. There was one white teacher on the faculty who was quite upset that no one wanted to discipline the Negress. I tried to explain to her that Negro worship was the new faith of the liberal and no argument, no matter how valid or articulate, would succeed in shaking the liberal’s faith in his Negro god. That was too much for the lady in question; she sank back into the swampland of platitudes. “We must understand their culture”, “You can’t judge them all by one bad apple”, “One must make allowances for years of oppression”, and on and on into the night it goes.

That was just a minor incident. What happens when a Negro commits a murder? We are not allowed to say that a black man committed a murder. And if it somehow slips out that a black man did commit a murder, we are usually told, as soon as the cuffs are on the black barbarian, that we mustn’t draw any racist conclusions from “one bad apple.” And sometimes we are told, as in the case of Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom that, “These things happen all the time, and we mustn’t conclude that black people go around killing whites simply because they love to kill whites.” Why mustn’t we make that conclusion? I made that conclusion long ago, because I saw what blacks did and I listened to what they said they were going to do. It is a religious war, with the black-worshipping liberals, the black-worshipping halfway-house Christians, and the black gods on one side. Pitted against that triumvirate are the European Christians. Are there any? So long as there is one, we are enough. Our Lord taught us that. And our European ancestors, men who saw with their hearts, followed in His train.

I recently finished a rereading of my favorite Walter Scott novel, The Antiquary. Spring was finally coming through the window, and my cat honored me by sleeping on my lap while I read. What a world Scott invokes! It is Christian Europe, peopled with saints, sinners, and those who are a combination of both. But they are all Europeans with souls. They have not sold their birthright as Europeans in order to worship at the shrine of the Negro. Nor have they denounced the living God for an abstract, propositional god. Their world is my world. I don’t want any other world, and I refuse to worship the colored gods of the new world order. Buried deep in the white man’s blood is a faith that says, “Nothing eternal dies.” And the Europe built by Europeans who loved Christ is eternal. “So long as the blood endures.”+

Reflections on Sir Walter Scott’s Birthday, August 15th

That elder leader’s calm reply
In steady voice was given,
‘In man’s most dark extremity
Oft succor dawns from heaven.’

-- Walter Scott’s The Lord of the Isles

As soon as the Tea Party Movement became a movement to prove “we are not racist,” it was finished. And so is every “grass roots” conservative movement finished before it starts when white Europeans of American and European heritage believe it is a sin for white people to defend or champion their own people. They have derived that idea from their schools and churches, both of which taught them that hatred of the white and love of the colored were the first and second of the Ten Commandments. Until white people are willing to abandon church theology and dismantle the schools, there will be no successful ‘tea parties’ in America or Europe.

Until that blessed time, when church theology is abandoned and the schools are destroyed, the Europeans who are not afraid of being called racist must keep the bridge to the European past safe and secure in case some last minute convertites want to become Europeans again and need access to the European past.

If a scared and timid European came to me and asked how he could stop being afraid of the racist label and start listening to the voice of his European ancestors, I would tell him to start with the man whose birthday we celebrate tomorrow, Walter Scott.

Scott has been called the father of the historical novel, but that does not describe the man’s work. Scott’s achievement was Shakespearean; he established the universal truth that Christ is risen from the dead, by faithfully depicting the culture of a particular people, the Europeans. By chronicling the lives and loves of the European people, Scott, like Shakespeare, gave us a vision of the living God. He is a mere “historical novelist” to the modern European because the modern European does not know how to think. Scott thought biblically, which means he thought from the heart outward. His heart informed his mind, not the reverse.

In the European fairy tales, the third dumb brother is really only dumb in the eyes of his worldly brothers. The third brother’s thought springs from a heart connected to Christ; therefore, his mind expresses thoughts that seem like idiocy to those men whose minds are corrupt. In their hearts they covet the things that only Satan can provide. When and if the European man tires of the Faustian things, he can turn to Scott to help him understand the eternal things.

I once read a literary critic’s commentary on Jane Austen in which he claimed that you couldn’t tell from her writings that she was a Christian. What fools these literary critics be! Austen’s Christianity is evident in every line she wrote. It is the same with Scott. The reason the modern intellectuals and the modern halfway-house Christians do not see Christianity in the novels of Scott is because their concept of religious faith is a modern, anti-Christian notion of faith. They think a faith that is embodied in a culture is not a faith. For them a faith must be made into a disembodied theology in order to be genuine. But the poet from antique Europe does not desire to be wiser than God. The Savior took flesh and dwelt among us; why then should we not look to see the faith embodied in the people who believed in the incarnate God? In Scott’s works, the European Christ, the God who is above us and beside us in spirit and in blood, takes center stage.

Because Walter Scott’s thought came from his heart, he was one of the last European intellectuals who was not a blood-sucking leech. We are all too familiar with the blood-suckers. They need the European past because it was real; there were genuine men and women back then. So the blood-sucking leech feeds on that past. He writes books and articles about those interesting antique Europeans, but always concludes by telling us just how wrong those people were – wrong about God, wrong about men and women, and wrong about love and honor.

A book called The Return to Camelot by a leech named Mark Girouard is an example of the modern European practice of desecrating Christian Europe and Walter Scott in particular. Girouard writes about the revival of chivalry in Britain during the late 18th century, extending through the 19th century, and into the early 20th century. Scott is credited with starting the revival, but Girouard has a surprise waiting for the reader who picks up the book thinking it is a book in praise of British chivalry. Oh no. At the end of the book he informs us that the English gentleman’s love of chivalry was the major reason for Britain’s involvement in World War I. He goes on to tell us that World War I was the end of chivalry altogether, and good riddance to it. And by extension, good riddance to Scott, since Girouard claims Scott spawned the chivalric revival in Britain.

In its essentials Girouard’s attack on Scott is the same as Mark Twain’s. By writing favorably about men and women who took the Christian principles of honor, loyalty, and pieta seriously, Scott undermined the modern civilization which liberals like Twain and Girouard think is self-evidently superior to antique Europe. Now, for the defense: The chivalric code of the Middle Ages is infinitely superior to the modern anti-chivalric code, but Scott’s chivalry is not medieval. Scott appreciates what was good in the Middle Ages, but he does not want to revive the cult of chivalry as practiced then. Scott’s chivalry, like his Christianity, is more organic, more personal, and more like the Christianity of his European forefathers who humanized the overly systematized and overly intellectualized Roman Christianity. The cult of chivalry as an affectation, as something separate from a man’s Christian faith, was repellent to Scott. The genuine chivalric code comes from a filial relationship with the triune God, not from the mind of man; nor is it necessary to be a soldier in order to practice it. Witness Reuben Butler in Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian.

Far from causing Britain’s involvement in World War I, Scott’s brand of chivalry, if the British people had adhered to it, would have prevented their involvement in World War I. The War came about because the leaders of Britain and the other European nations no longer believed in the code that flowed naturally from a belief in the God whose portrait we see in the novels and epic poems of Sir Walter Scott.

I’m frequently chided and sometimes excoriated by practical-minded right-wingers for bringing mere writers of fictional fables, such as Walter Scott, into serious discussions on such issues as race and immigration. But don’t you see? Europeans are hopeless and helpless in the race war because they don’t see what Scott saw when he looked at Europe. The men and women of Scott’s Europe would not write a protest letter when barbarians murdered and tortured their own people. Nor would they try to vote an invasion away. Scott is more than relevant, he is a necessity. The European must see what Scott saw and feel like he felt if he is ever going to reclaim his soul and his nation. Scott taught us as Dominie Sampson taught young Bertram of Ellangowan:

“But I trust,” said Bertram, “I am encouraged to hope, we shall all see better days. All our wrongs shall be redressed, since Heaven has sent me means and friends to assert my right.”

“Friends indeed!” echoed the Dominie, “and sent, as you truly say, by Him, to whom I early taught you to look up as the source of all that is good.” +

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In Scotland Again

No home, I am sure, in which a great man has lived, preserves his memory more vividly and more lovingly than Abbotsford preserves the memory of its founder.

Sitting here in his study, it is difficult to think of Scott’s place in literature. It is of the man I think, the man whose character was pure gold. 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.

-- by H. V. Morton

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Tales of a Traveller

Of his public character and merits, all the world can judge. His works have incorporated themselves with the thoughts and concerns of the whole civilized world, for a quarter of a century, and have had a controlling influence over the age in which he lived. But when did a human being ever exercise an influence more salutary and benignant? Who is there that, on looking back over a great portion of his life, does not find the genius of Scott administering to his pleasures, beguiling his cares, and soothing his lonely sorrows? Who does not still regard his works as a treasury of pure enjoyment, an armory to which to resort in time of need, to find weapons with which to fight off the evils and the griefs of life? For my own part, in periods of dejection, I have hailed the announcement of a new work from his pen as an earnest of certain pleasure in store for me, and have looked forward to it as a traveller in a waste looks to a green spot at a distance, where he feels assured of solace and refreshment. When I consider how much he has thus contributed to the better hours of my past existence, and how independent his works still make me, at times, of all the world for my enjoyment, I bless my stars that cast my lot in his days, to be thus cheered and gladdened by the outpourings of his genius. I consider it one of the greatest advantages that I have derived from my literary career, that it has elevated me into genial communion with such a spirit; and as a tribute of gratitude for his friendship, and veneration for his memory, I cast this humble stone upon his cairn, which will soon, I trust, be piled aloft with the contributions of abler hands.

-- by Washington Irving

In Loving Tribute to Sir Walter Scott on His Birthday, August 15th, 1771

He was Christian Europe’s greatest spokesman. A man incapable of lying, of meanness, or anything that was less than Christian. He took the chivalric code of the medieval ages, lying in disuse in the dustbin of history, and revived it for a whole generation of Europeans. But Scott’s chivalry was much deeper than the chivalry of the medieval knights and squires. Scott was a proponent of a chivalry of the heart that belongs to all Europeans who see Christ in the European mists. Braver than the bravest, the truest, most valiant heart in Christendom: that was and is Sir Walter Scott.

Hymn for the Dead

The day of wrath, that dreadful day,
When heaven and earth shall pass away,
What power shall be the sinner’s stay?
How shall he meet that dreadful day?

When, shriveling like a parched scroll,
The flaming heavens together roll;
When louder yet, and yet more dread,
Swells the high trump that wakes the dead,

Oh! on that day, that wrathful day,
When man to judgment wakes from clay
Be THOU the trembling sinner’s stay,
Though heaven and earth shall pass away.

Hush’d is the harp—the Minstrel gone,
And did he wander forth alone?
Alone, in indigence and age,
To linger out his pilgrimage?
No; close beneath proud Newark’s tower,
Arose the Minstrel’s lowly bower;
A simple hut; but there was seen
The little garden hedged with green,
The cheerful hearth, and lattice clean.
There shelter’d wanderers, by the blaze,
Oft heard the tale of other days;
For much he loved to ope his door,
And give the aid he begg’d before.
So pass’d the winter’s day; but still,
When summer smiled on sweet Bowhill,
And July’s eve, with balmy breath,
Waved the blue-bells on Newark heath;
When throstles sung in Hareheadshaw,
And corn was green on Carterhaugh,
And flourish’d, broad, Blackandro’s oak,
The aged Harper’s soul awoke!
Then would he sing achievements high,
And circumstance of chivalry.
Till the rapt traveler would stay,
Forgetful of the closing day;
And noble youths, the strain to hear,
Forsook the hunting of the deer;
And Yarrow, as he roll’d along,
Bore burden to the Minstrel’s song.

-- from The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Sir Walter Scott Again

I recently saw a recommended reading list put out by some organization that purported to be Christian. Walter Scott was not on the list. Such an admission is... Well, I’m at a loss for an adequate analogy, so I’ll have to settle for some inadequate ones. It would be like leaving Babe Ruth off the list of great homerun hitters or leaving Saint Francis of Assisi off the list of great saints.

Scott, like P. C. Wren, is undervalued as a writer because he believed in chivalry, a code replaced in modern times by psychology. Scott never takes sides against the Catholic Stuarts and for the King George Protestants, nor against the Covenanters and for the King George Anglicans. He lets the reader take sides, but Scott’s authorial voice does take sides on the issue of chivalry. The noble characters have it, and the bad ones don’t.

Scott is credited with inventing the historical novel, but that is a mere literary trifle compared to his real achievement. Scott’s achievement consists of the Christian vision conveyed in the totality of his novels and poetry. His Christianity is strikingly pure and elemental. The villainous characters pursue knowledge, wealth, and power, while the heroic characters cling to the intangible values of loyalty, love, and charity. Throughout his novels and poetry we see the words of St. Paul embodied: “The letter killeth and the spirit giveth life.” Scott always looks backward to a nobler time when antique Christian virtues were practiced. In contrast, the new age that Scott describes is dominated by lawyers and Pharisees. And by ‘lawyers,’ Scott means those with a lawyer’s mentality; for not all lawyers in Scott’s works have a lawyer’s mentality.

I think Scott, like Shakespeare, will always need to be read by Christians. He shuns the merely theological Christianity for the deeper incarnational Christianity. His Christianity is organic; he gets to Christ through the human.

Scott is often depicted as the conservative in contrast to Dickens, the radical. But this is incorrect. Both writers are conservative in the good sense, in that they espoused a basic non-modern Christianity and opposed the new order of capitalist greed and avarice. It is just that by the time Dickens was writing, capitalism had become so entrenched that opposition to it seemed more like radicalism than in Scott’s time.

My favorite work of Walter Scott is whatever book of his I am reading currently. But if pressed to come up with favorites, I would say that “Harold the Dauntless” is my favorite of the epic poems, and The Antiquary, The Heart of Midlothian, and Quentin Durward are my favorites among the novels.

Scott, in his numerous novels about the ill-fated Stuart kings, gives us a very poignant and moving depiction of the heart-rending desolation of exile. Take the novel Redgauntlet for example. When the Great Cause is truly lost, the title character leaves Scotland forever, still loyal to his lawful King. One does not have to be a Jacobite to identify with Redgauntlet. Cannot we, the Christian remnant, see ourselves in the present day as being in the same position as Redgauntlet? Having championed the cause of the old antique Christianity, a Christianity where race and kinship mean something, are we not exiles from our own Church just as Redgauntlet was an exile from Scotland? When looked at in this light, Redgauntlet’s parting is particularly poignant.

The general drew a little aloof, and signed to Redgauntlet to speak with him while this scene proceeded. 'It is now all over,' he said, 'and Jacobite will be henceforward no longer a party name. When you tire of foreign parts, and wish to make your peace, let me know. Your restless zeal alone has impeded your pardon hitherto.'

'And now I shall not need it,' said Redgauntlet. 'I leave England for ever; but I am not displeased that you should hear my family adieus.--Nephew, come hither. In presence of General Campbell, I tell you, that though to breed you up in my own political opinions has been for many years my anxious wish, I am now glad that it could not be accomplished. You pass under the service of the reigning monarch without the necessity of changing your allegiance--a change, however,' he added, looking around him, 'which sits more easy on honourable men than I could have anticipated; but some wear the badge of their loyalty on their sleeve, and others in the heart. You will, from henceforth, be uncontrolled master of all the property of which forfeiture could not deprive your father--of all that belonged to him--excepting this, his good sword' (laying his hand on the weapon he wore), 'which shall never fight for the House of Hanover; and as my hand will never draw weapon more, I shall sink it forty fathoms deep in the wide ocean. Bless you, young man! If I have dealt harshly with you, forgive me. I had set my whole desires on one point,--God knows, with no selfish purpose; and I am justly punished by this final termination of my views, for having been too little scrupulous in the means by which I pursued them.--Niece, farewell, and may God bless you also!'

And God bless you, noble Redgauntlet!

And who but a real Christian, a Christian in the blood, could write so well of true love?

But earthly spirit could not tell
The heart of them that loved so well.

True love's the gift which God has given
To man alone beneath the heaven.

It is not fantasy's hot fire,
Whose wishes, soon as granted, fly;

It liveth not in fierce desire,

With dead desire it doth not die;
It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.

--from “Lay of the Last Minstrel”

It has been said that all English literature is a footnote to Shakespeare. Sir Walter Scott would not disagree; his work is filled with Shakespearean references and Shakespearean themes. But I would add that Scott makes a magnificent footnote and a necessary companion to the great bard. +

Scott’s Europe

“...you must think of your own household first, or else you are worse even than
the infidels.” – The Heart of Midlothian

In the 21st century, when it appears that men and women are mere robots controlled by some great computerized creature with a giant brain, it is often hard to imagine that mankind consists of individual personalities connected to a personal God. And of course that is what Satan wants. When the world is finally completely occupied by robotic humans, watching porno movies and blood sports with soulless eyes, he will be complete master.

There is no author who can be read and used as a magic talisman to protect one from the academics. All authors, in the hands of literary critics, can be made into forerunners of modernity. Having said that, let me hasten to add that there is one author, who, if read by a receptive reader genuinely wanting to be exposed to a vision contrary to modernity, can start a man on the path to the full-blooded integral faith of our European ancestors. That author is Walter Scott.

Scott’s achievement is truly remarkable. With the exception of the Christian tragedy Bride of Lammermoor, he gives us Christian epics. And he gives us a genuine Christianity built from the ground up. He starts with individual personalities and builds up to a vision of a personal God that is the same God that St. Paul saw and wrote so eloquently about in 1Corinthinians 13. Unlike Dante, Scott does not start with an abstract, cruel idea of God and proceed to expound, as an expert does, on the various attributes of that cruel God. That is not Walter Scott’s way. Scott writes as a fellow pilgrim. He doesn’t expound a system; he exposes the heart of God by showing us the image of that heart in his Christian heroes and heroines. And through those heroes and heroines, we see a unique civilization that points to that other world, His world.

The liberals take a rather curious stance on the issue of the distinctiveness of Christian, European civilization. On the one hand, they deny that a distinct European civilization ever existed. “It is no different from any other civilization.” Then in the next breath, the liberals tell you that the older European civilization was distinct – it was distinctly evil.

And the liberals are not the only group in denial. There is a segment of the religious community that also denies the distinctiveness of Christian, European civilization. They usually cite St. Augustine and tell you that there is no such thing as a Christian civilization. There is the City of God and the City of Man, and never the twain shall meet. But the trouble with that nose-in-the-air, Manichean assertion is that it denies reality. While acknowledging the incredible differences between a man-made civilization and the Kingdom of God, one must see, if he has eyes to see and a heart that still lives, that European civilization did, in contrast to every other civilization that ever existed on the face of the earth, allow mankind to see Christ through a glass darkly. And it needs to be stressed that a theologian who fails to distinguish between heathendom and Christendom, placing them both in the arbitrary category of ‘the city of man’, is more in line with Buddhism than he is with Christianity.

There is no question that Walter Scott’s Christian Europe is the reality, while the liberal’s brave new world and the theologians’ abstract world are false. But they cling to their false worlds. Why?

The secular liberal clings to his brave new world because in that brave new world there is no judgment, because there is no God to judge. Of course there is no mercy either, because there is no God to extend mercy. The liberal has rejected that world of Adam and Eve, original sin and redemption. He thinks, like Shylock, that being free from original sin he has no need for God’s mercy: “What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong.” And if the world is not wrong because of original sin, the liberals reason, then it must be wrong because non-liberals, namely white European Christians, are impeding the onward and upward march to Utopia. So white Europeans who are still European are dragged before the bar of Liberaldom and found to be guilty of racism, which is the liberals’ word for treason. But at the same time, the liberals assert that there really is no difference between the white and the black. “We are all God’s children.” Whoops, the liberal can’t say that, so he backtracks: “We are all part of the brotherhood of man. But wait – the white man is not part of the brotherhood of man; he is an evil ...” It gets hard for the liberal. All those contradictions give him a headache.

And why does the theologian deny the distinctiveness of the Christian, European culture? The theologian makes his denial in order to preserve his power base. When the veil of the temple was rent, so were the Greek paradigms of thought. Wisdom was not to be found in the abstracted thought of Aristotle but in the sacred heart of Christ. So the folk wisdom of a people connected to the Heart of Christ is superior to the abstracted, cognitive thought of a great philosopher or theologian. The theologians cannot accept that, which is why they deny the reality and the possibility of a Christian culture. If there were such a thing, they would have to subordinate their abstractions to the hearts of a people united to Him.

The liberal and the theologian stumble over the human factor. They are unable to accept the fact that God always reveals Himself to man through humanity. He chose a particular people to carry out His divine plan, and His ultimate revelation was in the form of the God-Man. This goes against the expectations of the liberal and the theologian. In their minds, a God who cannot be known by the human mind through contemplation or the study of the natural or cosmic world ("May the force be with you") is not a real God.

Whether you believe the Europeans are the actual blood descendants of the people of Israel or their adoptive spiritual descendents, it is clear that only the European people took the incarnate God into their hearts and made Him their King and kinsman. Their civilization was the only civilization rooted in heaven. And now, when we face an election in this country (and similar elections are taking place throughout the European world) in which we are forced to choose between two leaders who despise Christian Europe, it is imperative that we affirm the reality of Walter Scott’s Europe. We have ventured much too far from it. It is the time to come home, to the ploughed furrow, the frequented pasture and the lane of evening lingerings.

Clan Europe

Richard Nixon was certainly not an integral hero from a Walter Scott novel, and Ronald Reagan with his ‘city built on a hill’ rhetoric and his ‘trickle down’ economic theories was not a great champion of Christian Europe. Nevertheless, I think both Nixon and Reagan had a residue of traditional, Christian, European blood left in their veins; they were not completely post-Christian. In contrast, Bush Sr., Clinton, and Bush Jr. were and are completely post-Christian. All three strike me as caricatures of human beings, examples of the new technocratic, post-Christian men forged by Satan and incapable of acting in any way contrary to Satan’s wishes.

Only the white European can be a technocratic man, because only the white European walked away from paganism. And he can not go back. He can go forward (in a decadent, sci-fi sense) or he can be faithful to his blood and become an integral Christian man, but he cannot become a pagan again.

In a wonderful epic poem, “Harold the Dauntless,” Walter Scott describes, through Harold the Dauntless, European man’s struggle from paganism to Christianity. Harold’s father is a full-blooded, pagan hero.

List to the valorous deeds that were done
By Harold the Dauntless, Count Witikind’s son!
Count Witikind came of a regal strain,
And roved with his Norsemen the land and the main.
Woe to the realms which he coasted! For there
Was shedding of blood and rending of hair,
Rape of maiden, and slaughter of priest,
Gathering of ravens and wolves to the feast:
When he hoisted his standard black,
Before him was battle, behind him wrack,
And he burn’d the churches, that heathen Dane,
To light his band to their barks again.

But even a full-blooded pagan can get tired of all that hacking, hewing, and pillaging.

Time will rust the sharpest sword,
Time will consume the strongest cord;
That which molders hemp and steel,
Mortal arm and nerve must feel.
Of the Danish band, whom Count Witikind led,
Many wax’d aged, and many were dead;
Himself found his armor full weighty to bear,
Wrinkled his brows grew, and hoary his hair.
He lean’d on a staff, when his step went abroad,
And patient his palfrey, when steed he bestrode.
As he grew feebler, his wildness ceased,
He made himself peace with prelate and priest;
Made his peace, and stooping his head,
Patiently listed the counsel they said.
Saint Cuthbert’s Bishop was holy and grave,
Wise and good was the counsel he gave:--

“Thou has murder’d, robb’d, and spoil’d,
Time it is thy poor soul were assoil’d;
Priests didst thou slay, and churches burn,
Time it is now to repentance to turn;
Fiends has thou worship’d, with fiendish rite,
Leave now the darkness, and wend into light:
O! while life and space are given,
Turn thee yet, and think of Heaven!”
That stern old heathen his head he raised,
And on the good prelate he steadfastly gazed: --
“Give me broad lands on the Wear and the Tyne,
My faith I will leave, and I’ll cleave unto thine.”

Count Witikind’s conversion is only a tenth-part sincere, and his pagan son is naturally appalled.

“What priest-led hypocrite are thou,
With thy humble look and they monkish brow.
Like a shaveling who studies to cheat his vow?
Canst thou be Witikind the Waster known,
Royal Eric’s fearless son,
Haughty Gunhilda’s haughtier lord,
Who won his bride by the ax and sword;
From the shrine of St. Peter the chalice who tore,
And melted to bracelets for Freya and Thor;
With one blow of his gauntlet who burst the skull,
Before Odin’s stone, of the Mountain Bull?
Then ye worship’d with rites that to war-gods belong,
With the deed of the brave, and the blow of the strong;
And now, in thine age to dotage sunk,
Wilt thou patter thy crimes to a shaven monk…”

Harold is banished by his father and sets out to carve a pagan name for himself even more fearsome than his father’s name. And he succeeds. He stands virtually alone against Christendom and heathendom, and he triumphs. But he was not quite alone. Harold, unknown to him, is beloved. Disguised as a male page, a Danish maid named Eivir remains true to Harold in his disasters and his triumphs. It is when Harold’s pagan god threatens Eivir that Harold realizes the inhumanity and the insufficiency of paganism.

“Harold,” he said, “what rage is thine,
To quit the worship of thy line,
To leave thy Warrior-God?—
With me is glory or disgrace,
Mine is the onset and the chase,
Embattled hosts before my face
Are wither’d by a nod.
Wilt thou then forfeit that high seat
Deserved by many a dauntless feat,
Among the heroes of thy line,
Eric and fiery Thorarine?—
Thou wilt not. Only can I give
The joys for which the valiant live,
Victory and vengeance—only I
Can give the joys for which they die,
The immortal tilt—the banquet full,
The brimming draught from foeman’s skull.
Mine art thou, witness this thy glove,
The faithful pledge of vassal’s love.”

“Tempter,” said Harold, firm of heart,
“I charge thee, hence! whate’er thou art,
I do defy thee – and resist
The kindling frenzy of my breast,
Waked by thy words; and of my mail,
Nor glove, nor buckler, splent, nor nail,
Shall rest with thee – that youth release,
And God, or demon, part in peace.”—
“Eivir,” the Shape replied, “is mine,
Mark’d in the birth-hour with my sign
Think’st thou that priest with drops of spray
Could wash that blood-red mark away?
Or that a borrow’d sex and name
Can abrogate a Godhead’s claim?”
Thrill’d this strange speech thro’ Harold’s brain,
He clenched his teeth in high disdain,
For not his new-born faith subdued
Some tokens of his ancient mood:--
“Now, by the hope so lately given
Of better trust and purer heaven,
I will assail thee, fiend!” – Then rose
His mace, and with storm of blows
The mortal and the Demon close.

Just any Danish maiden, so long as she is comely and fair, will no longer suffice for Harold. He loves a distinct personality in Eivir, and he needs the God-Man, who loves distinct personalities, if he is to save Eivir.

Scott held abstract theory in religion in the same contempt he held abstract theory in politics. But he believed in and revered the non-abstract Christianity of Harold the Dauntless. There is no dichotomy, as the ‘New Age’ pagans would have us believe, between the European Christianity of Walter Scott and the Christianity of the early Church; they are one.

The current group of presidential candidates simply mirror our society. Hillary and McCain are both products of the post-Christian epoch of the white man’s history. They have reverted to paganism, but they add an even sicker, technocratic dimension to their new paganism. Hillary is a votaress of Cybele without the sensuality, and McCain is a devotee of Mars without the passion. Cold, sterile abortions and massive bombing raids represent the new technocratic Cybele and Mars.

A demented Mau Mau like Obama could only rise to prominence in a post-Christian society. He alone among the candidates comes from outside the European tradition. He is not post-Christian; he is pure barbarian. He would be imprisoned or exiled in a truly Christian society, but in a post-Christian society, he is a god.

There is one benefit to be derived from living in a society that has gone completely over to the devil. You have clarity. Let me use Nixon and Reagan as examples again. When you see some Christian remnants in such men, you think about working within existing structures and building on that remnant of faith. But you don’t know how far to go with a mere glimmer of hope. “At what point do I give up on men on the brink of the abyss of post-Christianity and forge on without them?” When the post-Christian Bushes and Clintons come to power, there is no longer any doubt; one can draw the sword and throw the sheath away.

My experience in the Roman Catholic Church mirrored my experience with American democracy. I kept making excuses for the actions of the pope and bishops, hoping for some glimmer of faith within them with which a man could unite and do battle against the barbarian and neo-pagan world. But at every turn, they were against the old Europe of the God-Man and for the New World Order of the barbarians and techno-barbarians. And that is a tragedy, but it is better to know that men whom you thought were allies are indeed your enemies than to have false friends at your back.

It has been rightly said of liberals that they make complex issues simple and simple issues complex. The issue of European identity is not complex. It is simple. Black barbarians have never shown the slightest capability of understanding the true Christianity. When they rule, they extinguish mercy and charity, and whether they profess voodoo or Christianity, the practice of their religion always results in barbarism. And the post-Christian technocrat has given us the barbarism of the machine. Under their rule, European man has suffered the same plight as laboratory rats. He has been dissected and then discarded.

It’s crystal clear now: good vs. evil. The Europe of Walter Scott and all the unsung, dauntless, Christian Harolds is our Europe. Our enemies are those who oppose its restoration. And those enemies are legion. But what choice is there? If we abandon Europe, we abandon Him. And that would truly be the unpardonable sin.

Of course we will never fight effectively against Satan if we hold back, afraid to fight, because we allow the false, outward piety of his minions to deceive us.

An evil soul producing holy witness
Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,
A goodly apple rotten at the heart.
O, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!

If we have hearts that still bleed at the thought of helpless Christian men and women being tortured by black barbarians, we will strike back against the barbarians, despite the protests of the man holding the mitre. And when George Bush turns his back on the white people at home and launches bombs on innocent civilians abroad, we should oppose him despite his ‘born again’ exterior. It is not confusing! If we still have hearts connected to Europe, when it was Europe, we will always instinctively strike back at Satan no matter what outward form he assumes. And now, when everything seems especially hopeless, is the time to strike back at Satan and his minions – for the logic of fairyland tells us that it is when hope seems nearly gone that “God’s relief by us is surely won.”

A Commentary on Shakespeare's Kings: The Great Plays and the History of England in the Middle Ages: 1337-1485

The author of Shakespeare's Kings, John Julius Norwich, is terrible as an interpreter of Shakespeare's plays, but he is good in his narration of the historical events taking place during the lives of Shakespeare's kings. And since the number of Norwich's interpretations of the plays is minimal, the book can be labeled a good one (with a major reservation about this type of historical narration, which I will address later).

Starting with Edward III of England (Norwich claims that Edward III was also written by Shakespeare), Norwich takes us through the turbulent reigns of Richard II (deposed by the noble Bolingbroke, soon to be Henry IV), Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI, Edward IV, and Richard III.

Norwich writes a chapter about each king and then writes a chapter about how the king and the events taking place during his reign are portrayed by Shakespeare. What is remarkable, Norwich maintains, is Shakespeare's historical accuracy. He is not inaccurate in the essentials; what he does do is compress time, combining events that happened over hundreds of years into a shorter span.

If one is familiar with these plays, Norwich's literary interpretations can be quite irritating. For instance, he blithely asserts that Richard III is the best of the historical plays. Why? Any one of the plays – Richard II, Henry IV Part I, Henry IV Part 2, or Henry V is superior to the earlier Richard III. In addition, Norwich's confident statement that Hotspur is the noblest character in Henry IV Part 1 overlooks what Shakespeare is doing with Prince Hal. Hotspur has an excessively macho view of honor, a kind of death wish: "Die all, die merrily." Falstaff has an excessively cowardly view of honor: "Discretion is the better part of valor." Only Prince Hal maintains a balance between the doomsday mentality of Hotspur and the cynical cowardice of Falstaff.

But there are many good things about Norwich's history. For one thing, he supports the traditional view of Richard III against Yorkist revisionists such as Josephine Tey. His findings support the views of Thomas More and Shakespeare: Richard III was the murderer of Edward IV's two sons and a thoroughly evil man and ruler. Interestingly enough, Bolingbroke (Henry IV) emerges as the noblest of kings, and yet some would say (not me) that he is the one who started the War of the Roses when he usurped Richard II. I would assert that Richard started the conflict when he abandoned the Christian view of monarchy, which views the monarch as a caretaker for Christ, and adopted the Asiatic and despotic view of monarchy, wherein the king views the whole Kingdom as his personal possession. When Richard indiscriminately started confiscating the lands of his subjects, he in essence abdicated the crown. Bolingbroke had the heart and courage to force him to pay the consequences. Up Lancaster, down York!

The real danger of a book like this is that one can get the impression that Shakespeare's history plays are worth reading because his plays are "essentially" accurate. Not so! One should not read the Shakespeare history plays for mere history; they have an importance beyond history – they are metaphysical plays about men and women with immortal souls.

I had an excellent 'facts and figures' history teacher in college who claimed that any true student of history had to be an atheist. "Any objective view of history forces one to that conclusion," he said. And when reading Norwich's history, one can see what my teacher meant. All the political machinations, all the bloodshed, and for what? For nothing. The pageant of the English kings looks like a glorified demolition derby with no ultimate purpose. But when we read Shakespeare's plays we see a spiritual presence moving in history. Prince Hal might die young and Bolingbroke might never achieve a secure kingdom, but in Shakespeare's plays, father and son share a moment that lifts us out of mere historical time into another dimension, a spiritual one:

KING HENRY.
O my son,
God put it in thy mind to take it hence,
That thou mightst win the more thy father's love,
Pleading so wisely in excuse of it!
Come hither, Harry, sit thou by my bed;
And hear, I think, the very latest counsel
That ever I shall breathe. God knows, my son,
By what by-paths and indirect crook'd ways
I met this crown; and I myself know well
How troublesome it sat upon my head:
To thee it shall descend with better quiet,
Better opinion, better confirmation;
For all the soil of the achievement goes
With me into the earth. It seem'd in me
But as an honour snatch'd with boisterous hand,
And I had many living to upbraid
My gain of it by their assistances;
Which daily grew to quarrel and to bloodshed,
Wounding supposed peace: all these bold fears
Thou see'st with peril I have answered;
For all my reign hath been but as a scene
Acting that argument: and now my death
Changes the mode; for what in me was purchased,
Falls upon thee in a more fairer sort;
So thou the garland wear'st successively.
Yet, though thou stand'st more sure than I could do,
Thou art not firm enough, since griefs are green;
And all my friends, which thou must make thy friends,
Have but their stings and teeth newly ta'en out;
By whose fell working I was first advanced
And by whose power I well might lodge a fear
To be again displaced: which to avoid,
I cut them off; and had a purpose now
To lead out many to the Holy Land,
Lest rest and lying still might make them look
Too near unto my state. Therefore, my Harry,
Be it thy course to busy giddy minds
With foreign quarrels; that action, hence borne out,
May waste the memory of the former days.
More would I, but my lungs are wasted so
That strength of speech is utterly denied me.
How I came by the crown, O God, forgive;
And grant it may with thee in true peace live!

PRINCE HENRY.
My gracious liege,
You won it, wore it, kept it, gave it me;
Then plain and right must my possession be:
Which I with more than with a common pain
'Gainst all the world will rightfully maintain.

And this is why Norwich's history is mere bagatelle compared to Shakespeare's history plays. That Norwich clearly doesn't understand the importance of Shakespeare's plays is indicated when he claims, toward the end of the book, that religion doesn't play a big part in Shakespeare's plays because Jesus Christ is not mentioned much. Unbelievable! Shakespeare is trying to write about reality. He sees a spiritual dimension in human beings that points toward Him, but he would be false to his profession if he had the characters walking around asking each other if they had been 'born again.' The reason Shakespeare's plays still resonate with us today is because he enables us to see reality clearly. We need vision more than a sermon. The former leads us to the living God, and the latter leads us to an idea about God.

Walter Scott followed in Shakespeare's footsteps. He writes about historical events but also supplies the spiritual undergirdings of the various events. And without those undergirdings, history is just a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing! And of course that is what the empiricist always concludes about European history – it signifies nothing. (As a matter of fact, that's why European history is only treated as a cautionary tale about the evils of being a white man.) But Shakespeare and Scott are divers. They go below the surface of European history and come to the surface again with a treasure that is of infinite value, the living God.

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?