What The Devil Is It All About Anyhow?

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. 

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.  

But even that, so I thought at the time, didn’t put me “on the right path”, I’ll call it, until
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,

Endorsed by St. Teresa of Calcutta

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.

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."

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. 

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.