I read books in order, a fact clear enough to me. I don’t know what the next book “in the list”
will be until I’m reading it, usually, but it is nonetheless always clear that a continuing message runs through
all of it consistently.
all of it consistently.
The last three or four books I’ve picked up have not held
my interest beyond the middle of the book and I’ve struggled lately to
understand why this long standing pattern
in my reading seemed to have been derailed.
One night I woke around 3:00 and after praying for a while, I had the
desire to get out of bed and read Ecclesiastes.
So I did. (You should too.) And went back to bed.
I had another impulse to read G.K. Chesterton’s book, The Everlasting Man. I have read this before, but like everyone else, some things go right over my head the first time I hear them.
Funny thing is, Chesterton’s book, I discovered, has some
similarities to Ecclesiastes. It speaks
of antiquity and the lack of evidence of his character that man leaves behind
from one civilization to the next. It is
all, as one might say, “gone with the wind.” Both Chesterton and Coheleth, the presumed
author of Ecclesiastes, speak of the necessity to focus on what will last, on
the one hand, and the realization that in the case of this world, that happens
to be nothing, but leaves the hope that this may not always be the case. Chesterton’s book was first printed in 1925
and Wikipedia says this about it:
“It is, to some extent, a
deliberate rebuttal of H. G. Wells’ The
Outline of History, disputing Wells’ portrayals of human life and
civilization as a seamless development from animal life and of Jesus Christ as
merely another charismatic figure.
Chesterton detailed his own spiritual journey in Orthodoxy, but in this book he tries to illustrate the spiritual
journey of humanity, or at least of Western civilization.”
Wells’ own embrace of evolution was artfully smacked down
by Chesterton as the mutterings of a writer who had no actual proof of what he
believed and wrote.
This argument of evolution vs. the divine plan for the
universe goes on today without end. For
many it simply isn’t cool to not “realize we must have evolved.” After all, “it’s so scientific.” However, as Chesterton points out, they fail
to see what is before their eyes because they refuse to stand back far enough
from what they observe to even know what they are actually looking at.
Chesterton debunks the idea that Christendom can be
compared to any other so called
religion saying this:
“It is not easy, therefore,
to expose the fallacy by which a false classification is created to
swamp a unique thing, when it really is a unique thing.”
Chesterton points out that you can’t look at Christianity
in the same league as other “world religions” simply by putting them in some
chronological order inserting Christianity ahead of Islam in the list.
All of this was making perfect sense to me and I was
soaking it in as I read, enjoying every delicious word of it. After a perfectly delightful first chapter on
what we do and DO NOT KNOW about “cave-man” Chesterton begins to describe the
other “so called” religions, dividing them into those that have “gods” , “demons”,
or “philosophers” as their focus.
I should say at this point, the previous books I’ve read
recently are, in this order, Demons,
Deliverance, and Discernment, by Fr. Mike Driscoll,
Today’s Destructive Cults and Movements, by Fr. Lawrence Gesy, and The Occult and the Third Reich by
Jean-Michel Angebert (published originally in French in the early 1970’s). So my ears perked up when I read the pages
Chesterton wrote about the so called religions of demons, about which, at this point,
I had a smug feeling of my own expertise.
However, I was not prepared for what he revealed. Remember, this book, The Everlasting Man, was
published in 1925 and he knew nothing of the condition of our time now in 2018.
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Endorsed by St. Teresa of Calcutta |
Chesterton wrote, “Superstition recurs in all ages, and
especially in rationalistic ages.” He
mentions such things as lucky charms, rabbit’s feet, and practices that even
the enlightened man seems unwilling to discard, but then he says,
“But there is another sort
of superstition that does definitely look for results; what might be called a
realistic superstition. And with that
the question of whether spirits do answer or do appear becomes much more
serious.”
In this case he is referring to those who purposefully
seek out the aid of evil spirits to “get the job done.” And they are willing to do whatever to please these evil spirits
and get the results they ask for. He
spells out the wretched truth about cannibalism and human sacrifice.
“They are refined and
intelligent enough to indulge sometimes in a self-conscious diabolism. ……… They are not doing it because they do not
think it wrong, but precisely because they do think it wrong. They are acting like a Parisian decadent at a
Black Mass.
…….And all over the world
the traces can be found of this striking and solid fact, so curiously
overlooked by the moderns who speak of all such evil as primitive and early in
evolution, that as a matter of fact some of the very highest civilizations
of the world were the very places where the horns of Satan were exalted,
not only to the stars but in the face of the sun.”
It was never primitive tribes who did these things, but rather
the sophisticated such as New Zealand Maories, the Aztecs and American Indians
in Mexico and Peru, whose culture was as “elaborate as Egypt or China.” Nor was it the Eskimo, who was perhaps simply
not “civilized enough” to engage in human sacrifice.
As this is a subject very hard to write about, Chesterton
said,
“This inverted imagination
produces things of which it is better not to speak. ……….But without dwelling much longer in these
dark corners, it may be noted as not irrelevant here that certain anti-human
antagonisms seem to recur in this tradition of black magic. There may be suspected as running through it
everywhere, for instance, a mystical hatred of the idea of childhood. People would understand better the popular
fury against the witches, if they remembered that the malice most commonly
attributed to them was preventing the
birth of children."
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Who today best fits that description? |
So when you see people running around with pussy hats on
their heads daring anyone to overturn Roe v. Wade, giving laud and honor to
Planned Parenthood, advocating full term abortion on demand, just know who you
are REALLY dealing with. This has
nothing to do with women’s rights or equality, clever concepts authored by the devil. It has to do with evil. Period.
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Only evil would drag the innocence away
from its own children and put filth across their chests
|
That they think themselves more intelligent than you are, more “evolved”
than you are, more elite than you are, less primitive than you are, only proves
the point how far away from God they are. Pray for them. It is true. They decide their own fate.
Jesus said to the weeping women of Jerusalem: Do not cry for me but for your children.
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