Tag: Christianity

100k martyrs annually

Don’t think the world has progressed past Christian persecution:

A top Vatican official has said around 100,000 Christians are killed
every year for reasons linked to their faith and pointed to the Middle
East, Africa and Asia as the biggest problem areas.

Monsignor
Silvano Maria Tomasi was quoted by Vatican radio on Tuesday as saying
that the figures were “shocking” and “incredible”.

Tomasi said
Christians were also forced to leave their homes and see their churches
destroyed in some parts of the world, and were often subjected to rapes,
kidnappings and discrimination. The Vatican official made particular reference to the kidnapping of two Orthodox bishops near Aleppo in Syria last month.

Unless new Charles Martels arise, secular and pagan persecution will eventually come to infest what was once Christendom just as it plagues much of the rest of the world.  The world always hates and fears what it cannot control. 

Christendom and the West were established by Christians willing to fight for their faith.  While there is room to discuss the theological correctness of their efforts, those who will give up their faith rather than die for it or fight for it have no place in the discussion.

A moment of silence

Of all the various sights of Rome, (and we did the full tourist program there with another homeschooling family), my favorite was this haunting image of the triumph of Christianity on the ceiling of the Sala di Constantino.  There are better paintings, and justly more famous ones, in the four Stanze di Raffaello, but there are none more powerful or poignant.

It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of the stark sepia simplicity of the image of the cross standing over the shattered pagan statue in comparison with the riot of colors and activity in the other paintings in the room, including The Vision of the Cross, The Battle of Milvian Bridge, The Donation of Constantine, and The Baptism of Constantine, an effect that is only heightened by the hordes of people shuffling through the Palace like vertical sardines. 

To look up from the press of that murmuring mass humanity and be viscerally reminded of the victory of the Cross, temporal as well as eternal, was both moving and inspiring.  Most of the messages encoded in the paintings are lost on modern Man, but this one is unmistakable.

Post-Christian Ukistan

British post-Christianity is increasingly Muslim:

A new analysis of the 2011 census shows that a decade of mass immigration helped mask the scale of decline in Christian affiliation among the British-born population – while driving a dramatic increase in Islam, particularly among the young.

It suggests that only a minority of people will describe themselves as Christians within the next decade, for first time.

Meanwhile almost one in 10 under 25s in Britain is now a Muslim. The proportion of young people who describe themselves as even nominal Christians has dropped below half for the first time.

This is a bad thing, but for the UK, not for Christianity.  It is the cultural Christians who are on the decline. No religion that grew from eleven frightened men to over a billion adherents has anything to fear from the vicissitudes of history.  The idea that there would be a great apostasy is hardly a surprise to any premillennial Christian.

What is a surprise, however, is the speed with which the secular humanists are being pushed aside by the pagans.

John Piper’s strange god

I wonder what devotees of the Diversity Gospel will make of this admission by one of the leading architects of diversity in Europe:

Labour sent out ‘search parties’ for immigrants to get them to come to the UK, Lord Mandelson has admitted. In a stunning confirmation that the Blair and Brown governments deliberately engineered mass immigration, the former Cabinet Minister and spin doctor said New Labour sought out foreign workers. He also conceded that the influx of arrivals meant the party’s traditional supporters are now unable to find work….

Lord Mandelson’s remarks come three years after Labour officials denied claims by former adviser Andrew Neather that they deliberately encouraged immigration in order to change the make-up of Britain.

Mr Neather said the policy was designed to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’. He said there was ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.

Senior Labour figures have been reluctant to concede they deliberately engineered the influx of migrants who have transformed communities over the past decade.

By the open admission of its most powerful advocates, “diversity” is a purposeful, destructive and genocidal program intended to destroy traditional European Christian culture. And it is John Piper’s bizarre claim that his god desires diversity, even more than his ‘Killer Jesus’ teaching, that demonstrates the very high probability that John Piper’s god is not simply the Christian God of the Bible, but rather a rationalized amalgamation of that God and the god of diversity, who is also known as The Prince of This World.

The Bible says: “Ye shall know them by their fruits.”  That is the Christian’s litmus test. And both diversity and John Piper clearly fail that test.

A tribute to John Piper

The Responsible Puppet writes a tribute to the old Calvinist:

On Easter Sunday John Piper preached his last sermon as pastor at my church, on April 21 we had a big Thanksgiving service for his retirement, and then last week the Gospel Coalition published an article that I wrote which expressed some of the reasons why I was glad he’d been my family’s pastor.  But closer to home for you, I thought I’d send my handy reference of areas where you and Pastor John disagree and agree: 

Six Things Vox and Pastor Piper Disagree On

  1. Calvinism: Is God a sparrow-slayer.
  2. Trinity: Is the historic definition Biblical.
  3. Race: Is Diversity good?
  4. Gentlemanliness: How should a woman be treated?
  5. Innerancy: Is the Bible we hold in our hand completely true?
  6. Harshness: What is good cause to be intentionally offensive 

Six Things Vox and Pastor Piper Agree About

  1. Abortion: Should it be legal? Is it always reprehensible?
  2. Male leadership in the church: Should women be pastors?
  3. Homosexuality: It is a sin?
  4. Rob Bell: Has he stepped away from the Gospel?
  5. Poetry: Is writing poems a worthwhile use of my time?
  6. Gospel: What is it?

I’ll just say that I’m in agreement with Pastor John on all twelve of these issues, which is a big reason why I’ve been at his church. But if you’re wondering if there’s anything that you and Pastor Piper are in agreement about, that I disagree with, it would be this:

  1. Cats: Are they worthwhile creatures, esp. as pets?

He refers, I believe, to my adherence to the one true apocrypha concerning the Creation of the Cat. Just to be clear, I have no doubt whatsoever that John Piper is a better man, and very little doubt that he is a better Christian, than I am.  This does not mean, however, that I am blind to what I see as his intellectual flaws or that I agree with what I view as his gibberingly mad positions on the murderous nature of God and the societal desirability of vibrancy.

I suppose we all have a tendency to attempt to remake God in our own image.  The difference between Piper’s harsh, judgmental vision of a red-handed god and my own more abstract, indifferent vision of a Creator who creates primarily for His own amusement much more likely reflects our personalities than an accurate portrait of God.  I suspect Piper himself would agree; I don’t think he is under any illusion concerning his ability to see through the glass that separates the material from the Divine more clearly than the Apostle Paul.

Since I don’t speak for God, I can’t say if John Piper was a faithful servant or even if he ran a good race. But what I can say, as an open and unrestrained critic of the man’s ideas, is that he did his best to be a faithful servant and to run the best race of which he was capable.  And if men are to be judged by their fruits, it would appear, at least to this very casual observer, that he has as little cause to fear as any man might hope to possess when facing judgment.

The Gospel according to St. Macklemore

If you want to understand why women are not permitted serve in Church leadership, and why human societies do not survive more than a few generations of young women being permitted to choose their own spouses, this fatuous attempt of a foolish young woman to speak for her idiot generation is a pretty good place to start:

The Church keeps scratching its head, wondering why 70% of 23-30 year-olds who were brought up in church leave. I’m going to offer a pretty candid answer, and it’s going to make some people upset, but I care about the Church too much to be quiet. We’re scared of change. We always have been. When scientists proposed that the Earth could be moving through space, church bishops condemned the teaching, citing Psalm 104:5 to say that God “set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.” But the scientific theory continued, and the Church still exists.

I’m saying this: we cannot keep pitting the church against humanity, or progress. DON’T hear me saying that we can’t fight culture on anything. Lots of things in culture are absolutely contradictory to love and equality, and we should be battling those things. The way culture treats women, or pornography? Get AT that, church. I’ll be right there with you. But my generation, the generation that can smell bullshit, especially holy bullshit, from a mile away, will not stick around to see the church fight gay marriage against our better judgment. It’s my generation who is overwhelmingly supporting marriage equality, and Church, as a young person and as a theologian, it is not in your best interest to give them that ultimatum.

My whole life, I’ve been told again and again that Christianity is not conducive with homosexuality. It just doesn’t work out. I was forced to choose between the love I had for my gay friends and so-called biblical authority. I chose gay people, and I’m willing to wager I’m not the only one. I said, “If the Bible really says this about gay people, I’m not too keen on trusting what it says about God.” And I left my church.

She swallowed the progressive lies, and as a result, chose abomination over Jesus Christ.  Unsurprisingly, given her grasp of theology and science history, she has it precisely backward. Her apostasy isn’t the result of Church intolerance and rejection of humanity and progress, it is the direct result of her church, and her family, tolerating progressive nonsense.

Women are dynamic. They follow the strong horse, they do not lead. Her behavior is no different than the young woman who married the Muslim who bombed the Boston Marathon, she is simply following the lead of the most forthright influence with whom she is in contact. If she lived in Victorian Britain, she’d be a prudish Christian. If she lived in Saudi Arabia, she’d wear hijab. In modern secular America, she piously puts a priority on all the St. Gays of her acquaintance and imagines that homogamy is an issue of genuine, rather than symbolic, import. 

And so she finds religion, in all places, at a Macklemore concert.

During the song, almost every person at the concert had their hands up and their eyes closed…it reminded me of church. The whole crowd spoke every word with Macklemore. We were thirsty for those words. We want to hear about equality and love in a gentle way. We’re sick of the harsh words of both sides. Say what you want about my generation, but we can smell fake from a mile away. This rapper from Seattle had brought us truth in song form, and we all knew it. I live in such a conservative bubble that I couldn’t believe the crowd’s positive, thankful reaction.

The Bible has a few choice words about those who call good evil and evil good. There is no equality in the Bible except in Jesus Christ.  Jesus himself said that he did not come bearing peace, but a sword, and that he would divide friends and families, divide the wheat from the chaff, divide sheep from the goats.

This ridiculous young woman worshipping St. Macklemore in a high school auditorium is the end result of all the campfire kumbayas, the compromises, and the watered-down attempts to be of the world rather than merely in it. It will end in tragedy, but we will be witness to a considerable amount of farce first.  The irony is that she genuinely believes her generation can smell fake from a mile away even as she regurgitates the ludicrous lies she swallowed without blinking.

John Piper was right

I haven’t changed my mind in the least about any of the things for which I have criticized him, but I do have to commend him for the spiritual perception he showed in his succinct dismissal of Rob Bell. He was interviewed about that last year by Justin Taylor:

“You famously tweeted, “Farewell Rob Bell” in response to his promotional video for his book Love Wins. Is there a place for theological reconciliation in the body of Christ?”

“To say yes to that—and you should say yes—would require serious definition. When you say theological reconciliation, you can mean two people with two different theologies working their way through to a common theology. That is their way of being reconciled. That’s what I give most of my energies to. I want to persuade people of what I see in the Bible, and work towards unity in truth. Probably what would be thought when [people] ask that question is: Can two people who maintain their differences in theology then be more reconciled? So, you wouldn’t say farewell; you would say hello. The answer is that it depends on the issues.

I don’t mind addressing the Rob Bell issue. When I watched the video of Rob Bell that was put up on Justin Taylor’s website, which was, I think, a link to his book on hell, my issue there was not primarily his view of hell. It was his cynicism concerning the Cross of Jesus Christ as a place where the Father atoned for the sins of his children and dealt with his own wrath by punishing me in his son. Rob Bell does not admire that. He doesn’t view the Cross that way, as a penal substitution.”

I detected a distinct whiff of sulfur about Bell from the first time I read a mainstream article lauding his ideas about Hell.  And it became completely obvious that he is one of the wolves in sheep’s clothing about whom the Apostle Paul warned when he declared this last month: “I believe God [is] pulling us ahead into greater and greater
affirmation and acceptance of our gay brothers and sisters and pastors
and friends and neighbors and coworkers.” 

Substitute any sinful adjective you like for “gay” and it rapidly becomes obvious how blatantly evil Bell’s position is.  The god that he worships is not the God of the Bible, and most certainly is not the Christian God, who is not tolerant, who is not affirming, and who is not accepting of everyone. To claim otherwise is to eliminate the very foundation of the Christian faith, which is that all men are fallen, that Jesus Christ died for man’s sins, and that he offers the only way to the Father.

Piper was correct. There is no place for the Cross in Bell’s religion.  There is not even any place for Jesus Christ. Whatever it may be, it is not Christianity.

So much to learn

Jared Diamond, the great prophet of geographical destiny, tells the West that it has much to learn from the tribal people of Papua New Guinea

“”I believe the few remaining tribes and nomad groups left on the
planet have a great deal to teach us,” he says and it is this belief
that inspired The World Until Yesterday.  Some tribal
customs, such as widow-strangling, will not be missed, of course. “We
should not romanticise traditional societies,” he says. “There are
horrible things that we want to avoid, but there wonderful things that
we should emulate.”

Take the example of child rearing. Far from
being harsh towards children, many tribes and groups adopt highly
permissive attitudes. “I mean permissive in that it is an absolute no-no
to punish a child. If a mother or father among African pygmies hits a
child, that would be grounds for divorce. There is no physical
punishment allowed at all in these societies. If a child plays with a
sharp knife and waves it around, so be it. They will cut themselves on
some occasions, but society figures it is better for the child to learn
the hard way early in life. They are allowed to make their own choices
and follow their own interests.””

I consider his theses to be absolutely absurd, but then again, there may be something to be said for the wise people of Papua New Guinea’s vigorous response to U.S. academics.

“A U.S. academic has been gang raped in Papua New Guinea by nine armed men who hacked off her blonde hair and left her husband tied naked to a tree. The 32-year-old woman, who was conducting research into exotic birds in a remote forest on Karkar Island, was walking along a bush track with her husband and a guide on Friday when they were set upon by the gang armed with knives and rifles. Her husband and the guide were stripped and bound by the men, who then used a bush knife to hack off the woman’s hair before raping her in a terrifying ordeal lasting 20 minutes.”

It would certainly make the average East Coast cocktail party more lively if the sort of overeducated midwits who take Diamond at face value were to follow the example of the noble people of Papua New Guinea in this regard.

Now, I realize that many doubt my thesis that most of the desirable tenets of Christian civilization will not survive in post-Christian society, but note that in Diamond, we already have a well-regarded, much-honored academic overtly advocating a return to many pagan, pre-civilized customs. But it never seems to occur to those who eagerly anticipate Western post-Christianity that those raised in a pagan society without Christian customs and strictures will not necessarily retain the civilized customs that are inculcated in the secularist or pagan raised in a Christian society.

It is easy to say, well, we’ll keep the Western strictures against widow-strangling, witch-burning, and academic-raping, we’ll just toss the ones against homosexual-marrying, public fornication, polygamy, and letting children play with loaded guns… wait a minute! The brutal reality is that a society in which most children are “allowed to make their own choices and follow their own interests” is a society where the values, and the resulting societal strictures, will eventually be decided by those semi-feral children and not their overly permissive parents.

What has long been decried by the civilized Christian West as “the cowardly act of animals” – how very raciss and judgmental – may well become the next “new normal”. No one should be so foolish as to believe that behavioral change on a societal level is either predestined or readily controlled by government bureaucracy. It is easier to destroy than create; it is easier to degrade than strengthen. The progressives who proudly proclaim that the youth of today are much more open to “gay marriage” should keep in mind that in the not-too-distant future, those formerly open-minded youths may well find themselves position of the disregarded, close-minded elderly, listening in horror as the progressives of tomorrow proudly proclaim that the youth are much more open to “sexual services on demand”.

Jesus loves you. God, probably not so much.

Comedians, gay rights activists, and “accomplished journalists” are probably not the right people to consult when you wish to contemplate Christian theology. Meanwhile, the New York Times slanders millions of Christians by falsely and absurdly misrepresenting both their faith and their attitude towards a particular group of notoriously unrepentant sinners.
The crowd laughs a little nervously when Minchin, an outspoken atheist,
begins to sing, “I love Jesus, I love Jesus.” They bought tickets to a
comedy show, not a religious revival. Minchin prompts the audience to
join him. “Who do you love?” he asks. “Sing it!” Soon the whole crowd is
singing “I love Jesus, I love Jesus,” along with Minchin, in a video
that has been viewed half a million times on YouTube. 
Then Minchin changes the lyrics: “I love Jesus, I hate faggots,” he
sings. “I love Jesus, I hate faggots.” The crowd stops singing along.
Minchin looks up from his guitar, pretending not to understand what the
problem could be. 
“What happened? I just lost you there,” Minchin says. He makes a
halfhearted attempt to get the singalong going again before giving up.
“Ah, well,” he shrugs. “Maybe these are ideas best shared in churches.” 
Those ideas — loving Jesus means hating gay people — are proclaimed in
Christian churches and on Christian television and radio broadcasts. The
combined efforts of the Family Research Council, the National
Organization for Marriage, “The 700 Club,” the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops, the Westboro Baptist Church, and countless
conservative Christian activists, preachers and politicians have
succeeded in making antigay bigotry seem synonymous with Christianity. 
This can cause a lot of heartache — with sometimes devastating
consequences — for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender children born
into fundamentalist or evangelical Christian families. Such was the case
for Jeff Chu, the author of “Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay
Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America.” Chu is an
accomplished journalist who recently married his male partner. But Chu’s
mother, a devout Baptist, didn’t attend her son’s wedding. She still
cries herself to sleep every night, Chu writes, tormented by the
certainty that her gay son is “lost.” 
As a child, Chu adored the song “Jesus Loves Me.” But does Jesus love
him now that he’s an openly gay adult? Chu has his doubts: “There are
still moments when I wonder whether my homosexuality is my ticket to
hell.”

Does Jesus still love Chu? Absolutely.  Does God hate those who refuse to repent of their abomination?  We have a strong Biblical basis for asserting that, given how many times we are told He hates the wicked.  It isn’t Chu’s homosexuality that is his ticket to Hell, it is his refusal to repent of his sin and his refusal to permit Jesus Christ to stand in his stead in the time of judgment.

We are all sinners. The very last thing I want is to have to stand behind my personal permanent record and be judged by it.  I want my official record, as far as God’s judgment is concerned, to be that of history’s only sinless man.  The proper question with which one should be concerned isn’t whether Jesus loves one or not, but whether God does.

This piece is as trivial as it is slanderous.  It is not “antigay bigotry” to claim that unrepentant sinners who not only glory in their sin, but define themselves by it, are headed straight for the eternal incinerator, especially if Hell does not exist.  If I were to say that homosexuals are all destined to be raped by unicorns and leprechauns, no one would consider it bigotry.  This is mere rhetoric, intended to modify Christian behavior to the liking of those who hate Christianity by a transparent attempt at emotional manipulation.

Either unrepentant homosexuals are Hell-bound or they are not.  No amount of touchy-feely Churchian welcomism will change that either way.  And to the extent that the wicked are welcomed into the Church without being warned of the need to repent, the Church is failing in its Christian duty.  Homosexuality, like almost every other sin, can be forgiven. But before forgiveness can be granted, there must be repentance.

Liberals always love to cite the example of the adulterous woman spared stoning by Jesus asking who will cast the first stone.  And they always leave off the vital conclusion, where Jesus tells the woman to “go and sin no more”.

The wickedness of the homosexual community can be seen in its corrosive effect on others.  Consider this passage in light of the requirement Jesus laid upon his followers:

After Benjamin Sullivan-Knoff came out to his parents in his sophomore
year of high school, his mother begged her son not to do so publicly.
She was working as an associate pastor at a conservative church — an
Evangelical Covenant Church — and she feared she would be fired if her
son came out. A few months later she reversed herself, asked for her
son’s forgiveness and gave him her blessing to come out. “I love this
denomination,” Eva Sullivan-Knoff tells Chu, “but I love my son more.”

She loves her son more than her denomination, which is fine. But she has revealed that she is no Christian disciple, she cannot be, as per the words of Jesus Christ himself.


“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and
wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life,
he cannot be my disciple.”
– Luke 14:26

Christianity is not the easy way.  It is the hard way. We forget that at our peril. And to those Churchians and non-Christians who would attempt to argue with the points presented here, I have a single question: precisely what sins beside homosexual fornication did Jesus Christ declare a man did not need to repent in order to be saved?

I suspect a connection

Ed Trimnell observes that not only are atheists far more inclined to attack Christianity than Islam, but some are even willing to publicly declare that Islam should be off-limits to atheist criticism:

“It seems that a writer at Salon.com is upset because the so-called “New Atheists” have been rather unkind to Islam of late. In a piece entitled “Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens: New Atheists flirt with Islamophobia” Nathan Lean suggests that these New Atheists should simply shut up about terrorism, sharia courts ordering death sentences for apostates, and honor killings in the Muslim world. Then they can go back to doing what atheists in the post-modern West are supposed to do: talk about the threat that evangelical Christianity poses to humanity. (After all, some of those hillbilly reactionary Christians still haven’t fully embraced same-sex marriage!)”

I suspect that this sort of thing might have something to do with the atheist hypocrisy:

“Hundreds of thousands of people have held protests in Bangladesh to
demand that the government introduce an anti-blasphemy law that would
include the death penalty for bloggers who insult Islam…. Supporters of Hefazat-e-Islam, an Islamist group which draws support
from tens of thousands of religious seminaries [and that has the backing
of country’s largest party, Jamaat-e-Islami], converged on Dhaka’s main
commercial hub to protest against what they said were blasphemous
writings by atheist bloggers, shouting “God is great — hang the atheist
bloggers”.”

Apparently the old chestnut about there being no atheists in foxholes isn’t all that far from the truth. Christians are holding to their faith even as they are murdered for it by Muslims in Nigeria and Egypt and by atheists in China and North Korea. Atheists, meanwhile, are showing that they don’t have the courage of their lack of conviction, thus proving my point that post-Christianity in the West is unlikely to look any different than post-Christianity in the Middle East.

A post-Christian West will be pagan, not secular. It will be in the form of dark gods like Santa Muerte and Damballah Wedo, and it will be rooted in death and cruelty. It should be recalled that whereas there never was any medieval “Dark Ages”, there is a very good reason why Jesus Christ was considered “the Light of the World” by civilized and scholarly men who were familiar with the darkness of pagan cultures that preceded Christian society. Merely having to compete with that Christian society considerably improved paganism, as even Julian the Apostate implicitly admitted in his futile attempt to build a paganism capable of rivaling it.

“Julian’s heart was set on a civil and religious reformation. He longed for amendment in law and administration, above all for a remodelling of the old cult and the winning of converts to the cause of the gods. He himself was to be the head of the new state church of Paganism; the hierarchy of the Christians was to be adopted — the country priests subordinated to the high priest of the province, the high priest to be responsible to the Emperor, the pontifex maximus. A new spirit was to inspire the Pagan clergy; the priest himself was to be no longer a mere performer of public rites, let him take up the work of preacher, expound the deeper sense which underlay the old mythology and be at once shepherd of souls and an ensample to his flock in holy living. What Maximin Daza had attempted to achieve in ruder fashion by forged acts of Pilate, Julian’s writings against the Galilaeans should effect: as Maximin had bidden cities ask what they would of his royal bounty, did they but petition that the Christians might be removed from their midst, so Julian was ready to assist and favour towns which were loyal to the old faith. Maximin had created a new priesthood recruited from men who had won distinction in public careers. his dream had been to fashion an organisation which might successfully withstand the Christian clergy; here too Julian was his disciple. 

“When pest and famine had desolated the Roman East in Maximia’s days, the helpfulness and liberality of Christians towards the starving and the plague-stricken had forced men to confess that true piety and religion had made their home with the persecuted heretics: it was Julian’s will that Paganism should boast its public charity and that an all-embracing service of humanity should be reasserted as a vital part of the ancient creed. If only the worshippers of the gods of Hellas were once quickened with a spiritual enthusiasm, the lost ground would be recovered. It was indeed to this call that Paganism could not respond. There were men who clung to the old belief, but theirs was no longer a victorious faith, for the fire had died upon the altar. Resignation to Christian intolerance was bitter, but the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found. Julian made converts — the Christian writers mournfully testify to their numbers —but he made them by imperial gold, by promises of advancement or fear of dismissal. They were not the stuff of which missionaries could be fashonied. The citizens were disappointed of their pageants, while the royal enthusiast found his hopes to be illusions. Mutual embitterment was the natural result.”
– The Cambridge Medieval History Vol. I, pp 362-363

That was 1,650 years ago. There is truly nothing new under the sun. Even today, we see “the passion which inspires martyrs was nowhere to be found.” The reason Richard Dawkins’s attempt to set up an atheist charity will ultimately be no more successful than the Emperor Julian’s efforts is because the Christian customs they seek to imitate are not inspired and encouraged for their own sake, but by the particular religious impulse. Both history and observation clearly indicate that it is no more possible to maintain the tenets and various aspects of Christian civilization considered desirable by non-Christians without the Christian faith to support them than it is to maintain intellectual function without a beating heart.

Such efforts can be maintained, for a short time, by extraordinary artificial measures. But they will fail soon enough. And then the true nature of pagan darkness will reveal itself again.