The Stranger

The Stranger within my gate,
He may be true or kind,
But he does not talk my talk--
I cannot feel his mind.
I see the face and the eyes and the mouth,
But not the soul behind.

The men of my own stock,
They may do ill or well,
But they tell the lies I am wanted to,
They are used to the lies I tell;
And we do not need interpreters
When we go to buy or sell.

The Stranger within my gates,
He may be evil or good,
But I cannot tell what powers control--
What reasons sway his mood;
Nor when the Gods of his far-off land
Shall repossess his blood.

The men of my own stock,
Bitter bad they may be,
But, at least, they hear the things I hear,
And see the things I see;
And whatever I think of them and their likes
They think of the likes of me.

This was my father's belief
And this is also mine:
Let the corn be all one sheaf--
And the grapes be all one vine,
Ere our children's teeth are set on edge
By bitter bread and wine.

--Rudyard Kipling (1908).

England and Rome

The story of the Reformation needs reforming

For five centuries England has been in denial about the role of Roman Catholicism in shaping it. The coin in your pocket declares the monarch to be Defender of the Faith. Since 1558 that has meant the Protestant faith, but Henry VIII actually got the title from the Pope for defending Catholicism against Luther. Henry eventually broke with Rome because the Pope refused him a divorce, and along with the papacy went saints, pilgrimage, the monastic life, eventually even the Mass itself – the pillars of medieval Christianity.

To explain that revolution, the Protestant reformers told a story. Henry had rejected not the Catholic Church, but a corrupt pseudo-Christianity which had led the world astray. John Foxe embodied this story unforgettably in his Book of Martyrs, subsidised by the Elizabethan government as propaganda against Catholicism at home and abroad. For Foxe, Queen Elizabeth was her country’s saviour, and the Reformation itself the climax of an age-old struggle between God, represented by the monarch, and the devil, represented by the Pope...

But in multicultural England, the inherited Protestant certainties are fading. It is time to look again at the Reformation story. There was nothing inevitable about the Reformation. The heir to the throne is uneasy about swearing to uphold the Protestant faith, and it seems less obvious than it once did that the religion which gave us the Wilton Diptych and Westminster Abbey, or the music of Tallis, Byrd and Elgar, is intrinsically un-English. The destruction of the monasteries and most of the libraries, music and art of medieval England now looks what it always was – not a religious breakthrough, but a cultural calamity. The slaughtered Popish martyrs look less like an alien fifth column than the voices of a history England was not allowed to have.

A spiritual calamity as well. The Anglosphere will not recover.

What if, what if ... Orthodox ecclesiology: every nation gets its own Church. But Rome clings to empire and Henry really was just making it up as he went along.

Britain still has serious thinkers, and in conjunction with Peter Hitchens' acknowledgment that multiculturalism is really just anti-white Marxist hatred, perhaps they are fumbling their way back to see what went wrong.

The Doom Loop, I

1. Dog and Man. The ancient contract between our two species has been breached. Dog breeders are creating sociopathic killing machines and mutants incapable of natural birth. Alexander Fiske-Harrison at Taki's relates the account of a 14-year old girl mauled to death by four beasts. As one commenter at the OP notes, the girl was probably menstruating though eating a meat pie in front of four feral animals would suffice. Man in our scientific age no longer understands Nature.

2. "A king out of water, in a dry and kingless age." Lawrence Auster died this Good Friday on the Western calendar after a long fight with pancreatic cancer, and receiving Unction in the Roman Rite. God rest his brilliant, angry soul. Unqualified Reservations remembers. (Friends of Lawrence are maintaining his blog, A View From The Right.)

3. The Last Psychiatrist gets drunk and posts about Social Security Disability. My line of work brings me a number of incidental contacts with this program. The taxpayer is being ripped off.

(Life is getting in the way of my favorite hobby, so I'm going to group more links and this seems a good category to post in seriatim. I've mentioned before about trying to strike a more upbeat tone, but the internet is where I go to be grumpy. Thankfully, I do have a life with positive people and much to enjoy.)