And There Reigns Love
“O, God, we have heard with our ears, and our fathers have declared unto us, the noble works that thou didst in their days, and in the old time before them.”
__________
I had a religious studies professor in college who was always rhapsodizing about the wonderful cosmic canopy of the pagan religions. They were one with nature because their gods were nature gods. The great tragedy occurred for the European when he allowed the religion of Jesus Christ to replace the more natural, vital religions of nature. Such was the wisdom of my learned professor.
Even a confused undergraduate such as me could see the fallacy in the great man’s paean to the nature religions of antiquity: what if the nature religions were false? My professor, in union with his follow academics and Pontus Pilate, who looked at Christ and asked, rhetorically, ‘what is truth?,’ started with the a priori assumption that truth was unknowable. Therefore man was free to make his own truth. And for my professor truth was nature and nature’s gods, because he found those gods more exciting, vital, and comforting than Christ. My professor was partially right; the pagan religions are more exciting and vital than Christianity if excitement consists of sexual licentiousness and blood-letting constitutes vitality. And the pagan religions are more comforting if a man prefers to live on the surface of life, anesthetized and fortified by a soul-deadening ideology that does not remind him of his mortality. That is the great benefit of living with the nature gods. You don’t have to go below the surface of life, and you can find superficial transcendence in blood and sex. Such transcendence has kept, and probably always will, the colored tribesmen content. But can paganism keep the white man in spiritual comfort? Won’t he eventually feel the need for a real faith? It seems that he doesn’t feel such a need; the combination of science and negro worship appears to be keeping the white man content. But if we look closer we can see that the post-Christian liberal is not being sustained by his new pagan faith. Having spent “the unbought grace of life” that came from Christianity the liberal is being sustained by the last lingering vapors of a civilization that has disappeared in the mists of time. When even the vaporous mists of Christianity disappear the liberal will be face to face with his negro gods, and he will not be able to endure it.
What are the Christian vapors that sustain a liberal despite his hatred of all things Christian? The hated family ties are one example. My sister, a mad-dog liberal, still sends out Christmas cards and attends family gatherings at Christmas time. Why? Because despite her professed hatred of all things white and Christian, she still needs the comfort of Christian lingerings. The fact that liberals are living in houses that have not yet been confiscated and given to the negroes, which is the case in South Africa and Rhodesia, is also because of Christian lingerings. Soon even the last Christian vapors will disappear. Will that signal the end or a new beginning for the white man? When finally able to see what was lost, will the white man strike back or will he merely curl up in the fetal position and die? We don’t know the numbers. But we do know there will be a few whites who prefer to die standing up. And God will use those whites to restore His people. It is an absolute in mad-dog liberal circles that Christianity was a false religion. “Christ did not die and rise from the dead,” the liberals tell us. And the halfway-house Christians parrot the liberals while adding their own twist: “Christ is still the son of God, but he is a son of God like we are Sons of God.” Richard Llewellyn, who wrote a heart-rending account of his Welsh coal-mining ancestors at the turn of the century, disgraces his ancestors by enveloping them in metaphysical filth:
It was then that I had thoughts about Christ, and I have never changed my mind. He did appear to me then as a man, and as a man I still think of him. In that way, I have had comfort. If he had been a God, or any more a son of God than any of us, then it is unfair to ask us to do what he did. But if he was a man who found out for himself what there is that is hidden in life, then we all have a chance to do the same. And with the help of God, we shall.
So Christ isn’t God, but there is a God, an unknown God. Everything Richard Llewellyn loved in that valley disappeared because he and his 20th century counterparts went searching for another God beside Christ. In the later part of the 20th century they found their new god, the noble black savage. Huw Morgan loved his father but couldn’t believe in the God of his father. What god do his descendents worship today?
I’ve read How Green Was My Valley three times. And at every reading I tried to love the Morgan family. I tried to love them because my ancestors were also Welsh coal miners. But it is only the father, who does not give up his faith in Christ as true God and true man, whom I love and respect. His sons, who still practice the ethics of Christianity but no longer believe in the divinity of Christ, fill me with sorrow and anger. Sorrow because of what they could have been, and anger because they spent the unbought grace of life with no regard for the consequences to future generations of Europeans. We have only the vapors of a Christian civilization left to us because men like Huw Morgan felt a loving God should not countenance the suffering men endure on this earth.
In contrast to How Green Was My Valley, which got great critical reviews and was made into a movie, stand the two Drumtochty novels of Ian Maclaren, Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush and The Days of Auld Lang Syne. No movie was made of the novels, which had popular success but no critical acclaim. Though the events depicted in How Green Was My Valley and the Drumtochty books were supposed to take place during the same time period, there was actually 46 years separating the works. Llewellyn’s book was written in 1940 while Maclaren’s books were written in 1894. The contrast is truly astonishing and all in favor, from my viewpoint, of Ian Maclaren’s Drumtochty novels. The men and women of Maclaren’s novels all believe in the Man of Sorrows. He is as real to them in His divinity and His humanity as the food on the table and the farmlands that yielded the food.
I don’t think the difference in religious viewpoint between How Green Was My Valley and the Drumtochty novels was the result of the greater religiosity of the Scotsman over the Welshman, nor do I think the difference lies in the fact that the Welshmen in Llewellyn’s book were coal-miners and the Scotsmen in Maclaren’s books were farmers. I can think of no profession more soul-deadening than coal-mining, but I don’t think that explains the difference in religious outlook we see in the book of the Welshman and the books of the Scotsman. The religious difference lies not in the ethnicity of the authors nor in the professions of their characters, but in the authors themselves. Maclaren is still a man of the 19th century. He is aware of the forces of modernity, but those forces have not shaken his faith in the God-Man. Llewellyn is a man of the 20th century; the forces of modernity have shaken his faith in the God-Man. W. H. Auden, writing about William Butler Yeats, said that Ireland had hurt Yeats into poetry. How Green Was My Valley didn’t hurt me into poetry, but it did, when I first read it as a young man, hurt me into thinking about the difference between the 20th century European and the pre-20th century European. You see, I desperately wanted to love those Morgans, “for I am Welsh you know,” but with the exception of the father, I couldn’t love them. Their authorial voice was suffering from the spiritual ennui that was spreading throughout all of Europe. And why should that be? We take it for granted now, but why should the 20th and now the 21st century European no longer believe that Jesus Christ is God and man? Authors such as Llewellyn usually cite the incredible suffering that exists on earth. That suffering, they tell us, makes belief in Jesus Christ impossible. But was the suffering of mankind in general and the Europeans in particular any greater in the 20th century than the preceding centuries? These things are hard to measure, but I don’t think we can say that suffering was any greater in the 20th century than in any other century. So if we can’t point to a sudden emergence of suffering as the cause of the Europeans’ rejection of Christ, the question hovers over us still: Why the loss of faith? I would suggest the Europeans’ loss of faith stems from their increased faith in science. It is easier to bear suffering if we think it is the inevitable lot of mankind. But once we are told that suffering is not inevitable, that science can eliminate it, we become more conscious of the injustice of our mortal condition and we reject the claims of a God who promised to redeem our suffering for the claims of a scientific cabal that can eliminate suffering. It is the oldest trick of the devil; he deceived Macbeth with it as he deceived Adam and Eve:
But ‘tis strange;
And oftentimes, to win us to our harm,
The instruments of darkness tell us truths,
Win us with honest trifles, to betray’s
In deepest consequence.
The honest trifle was that science could eliminate some of the suffering caused by plagues and disease. But we were deceived in the deepest consequence: science could not redeem men from their sins nor could it give them eternal life. And the unlooked-for consequence – only Satan saw what was coming – of the Europeans’ infatuation with science as a means to alleviate physical suffering was a tenfold increase in spiritual suffering, because the Europeans lost their faith in Jesus Christ who redeemed the world through His suffering and death on the cross. Men can endure suffering if they believe they do not suffer in vain or alone. Bereft of faith and feeling alone in the universe, the Europeans turned to science and negro worship in order to anesthetize their humanity and stimulate their blood. And of course it hasn’t worked. Try as they might white people can never become happy-go-lucky pagans. For them it is heaven or hell; there is no in between.
In Scott’s epic poem Marmion he writes of the “tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” The European has woven a web of lies around Liberaldom. And the first lie was the lie which spawned every other lie: “You shall be as gods.” With science to alleviate suffering and the negro to provide an object of worship, the European is desperately trying to keep the living God at bay and derive comfort from his man-made, mind-forged faith. And through it all, the liberal Europeans’ process of lying self-deception, the negro and the other colored tribesmen have remained the same. They follow the endless pagan cycle of sacrifice without mercy. The colored tribesmen do not understand the reason why white people have abdicated their right to exist. They only know that it is so, and they move in for the kill. It’s not a case of “We must act now” and vote our troubles away. Nor is it the eleventh hour. We’re well past that. White people have lost their will to live, because they have no racial memory. The neo-pagan likes to hearken back to the pre-Christian era as the golden age of Europe. But the European never had a pagan era as the non-European people did. The European, even in the midst of his paganism, heard the call of the one true God speaking to His people, “I have some rites of memory in this kingdom.” Indeed He does. The Europeans embraced Christ as men embrace a brother or a father from whom they were separated when young, but with whom now, in their manhood, they are reunited. The Christ bearers! Listen to your blood, look back through the mists, and behold your God. He looks at us now, as He looked at Peter after the third denial, with infinite love and compassion. Truly that Man, fully human and fully divine, is worth fighting for. No other race will fight for Him if the European race does not. Multiculturalism and multiracialism are lies perpetuated by the father of lies. If we fight for the full restoration of the European people we fight for His reign of charity. “They shall bring the glory and honour of the nations into it.” +
