Gnostics, Puritans, and the Left

Professor Bruce Charlton, whose writings I very much value and respect, took exception the other day to the meme that identifies the Left with Puritanism. Here is his opening paragraph:

I think it was perhaps Mencius Moldbug who originated the stupid idea - which I have seen repeated in hundreds of different versions - that the current, mainstream, politically correct Left are puritans.

This meme, it would appear to me, is an extreme oversimplification of a concept that can be found in Eric Voegelin’s The New Science of Politics: An Introduction, which was first published by the University of Chicago Press in 1952. I note, in passing, that this was twenty-one years prior to the birth of the man who writes under the nom de plume Mencius Moldbug.

In the fourth chapter of The New Science of Politics, Voegelin traced the origins of the secular millennialism of modern mass political movements, i.e., the idea of ushering in a new Golden Age, back to an earlier revival of millennialist eschatology in the teachings of the twelfth century Italian theologian and monk, Joachim of Flora. He set this departure from Augustinianism in the context of a revival of Gnosticism, the largest family of heresies against which the orthodox contended in the early centuries of Christianity. Gnosticism was so named because it maintained that those initiated into its mysteries comprised a spiritual elite who possessed gnosis – detailed special knowledge about matters that are not spelled out in the Scriptures and orthodox Christian tradition. Since this “knowledge” often contradicted orthodox doctrine, Gnosticism was rejected as heresy by the orthodox. In the following chapter, Voegelin examined Puritanism as both an example case of revived Gnosticism and as the first revolutionary modern mass movement.

A very abridged version of Voegelin’s thesis is that sixteenth-seventeenth century Puritanism and twentieth century mass movements such as liberalism and Communism are all modern versions of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism. The meme that Professor Charlton dislikes so much seems to be this same thesis simplified further and to the point of extreme inaccuracy.

The question then becomes one of whether this thesis is right or wrong. Professor Charlton goes on to say:

Of course there is a grain of truth, else the idea would have gone nowhere. The grain is that New Left is a descendant of the New England Puritans who emigrated from (mostly) East Anglia, became the Boston Brahmins, founded Harvard etc.

And this class, via various mutations including the Transcendentalists and their circle of radicals Unitarians, abolitionists, feminists etc) evolved into the post Civil War US ruling class; who were the fount of post-middle-1960s New Leftism.

This is true, but there is one glaring omission. For there to be a New Left there had to have first been an Old Left. When we bring that Old Left into the equation we find that there is a lot more than just a “grain” of truth to the identification of Puritanism with the Left. There is a sentence in Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs From Beyond the Grave that expresses this perfectly. Here it is in the recent English translation by Alex Andriesse of the first twelve books of the Memoirs, published last year by the New York Review of Books:

“The Jacobins were plagiarists; they even plagiarized the sacrifice of Louis XVI from the execution of Charles I” (p. 363 in the edition mentioned, this is found in the second paragraph of the fourth chapter of Book Nine).

The French Revolution was the well-spring of the Old Left. The revolutionary socialist movements of the nineteenth century all looked back to the French Revolution as their inspiration, the Communist League for which Karl Marx wrote his notorious manifesto began as a splinter group of the Jacobin Club that had perpetrated the French Revolution, and the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917, which introduced the plague of Communism to the world and became the pattern for all subsequent Communist revolutions, was itself patterned on the French Revolution. The French Revolution, in turn, was, as Chateaubriand said, an imitation of the Puritan rebellion against Charles I in the previous century.

The Puritan rebellion against King Charles inspired the Jacobin revolution against King Louis XVI, which in turn inspired all subsequent revolutions. This makes Puritanism the prototype of the revolutionary Left, just as Cromwell’s tyranny was the prototype of the French Reign of Terror and the Soviet and other Communist totalitarian regimes. While it was Puritan actions that the Jacobins and later leftists were imitating, theology similar to that of the Puritans also played a role in the French Revolution, if not as large of a one as in the rebellion in England. William Palmer observed that Jansenism, a heretical movement within the Roman Catholic Church that had a similar predestinarian theology to Calvinism, had become so strong in pre-Revolutionary eighteenth century France, that it was able to resist Rome’s attempts to suppress it, and, indeed, that it had successfully used the French Parliament to thwart the king’s efforts to uphold orthodoxy. (A Treatise on the Church of Christ, Vol I, London, J. G. & F. Rivington, 1838, pp. 324-328) Granted, this happened in the reign of Louis XV fifty years prior to the Revolution but Puritan efforts to turn the English Parliament against their king had also begun long before the accession of Charles I. It is also worth noting that Jean-Paul Marat, the Jacobin pamphleteer whose bloodthirsty words incited the September Massacres, the mass murder of prisoners in which the non-juring Roman Catholic priests were especially targeted and which can be regarded as either the precursor to or the first stage of the Reign of Terror, was raised in a family that had a very similar theology to that of the Puritans. His mother was a Huguenot and his father was a convert to Calvinism.

Not only is it an indisputable historical fact that Puritanism was the root of the tree of leftism, from which the trunk of Jacobinism sprung, which in turn produced the branches of socialism, Communism, etc. it is also true that political correctness, the element of the New Left that is most often said to be Puritanical, is derived from a Bolshevik practice with a Jacobin antecedent based upon a Puritan precedent. Political correctness as we know it today began on Western academic campuses in the 1960s and spread from there throughout the rest of Western culture. It began as the insistence upon the use of racially sensitive language but quickly expanded to include demands for language that is sensitive in other areas as well. There were, of course, a host of other demands which accompanied these, but the defining essence of political correctness is the insistence upon the use of language that has been stripped of anything that might be perceived as offensive on racial, sexual, etc. grounds. In this the New Left was, consciously, I would argue, imitating the Soviet phenomenon that was the basis of the "Newspeak" depicted in George Orwell's 1984. The Jacobin antecedent of Bolshevik Newspeak, can be seen in the date of the Great Reaction when the Reign of Terror ended and its architect Robespierre was condemned to die by his own guillotine. This date on our calendar is the 27th of July but we remember it historically as the Ninth of Thermidor. Why? Because the Jacobins imposed a completely new calendar upon France, in which years were counted from the deposing of King Louis XVI, and consisted of twelve months which, since they also started from that date did not correspond to the ones on our calendar and were given funny sounding names like Messidor, Thermidor, and Fructidor. The Puritan precedent for this was their insistence on referring to the days of the week as the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. rather than by their usual names, which the Puritans objected to on the grounds of their pagan origins. Orthodox Christians can understand and to varying degrees sympathize with the Puritans' reasons for doing this - less so, with their abolition of Christian holy days - but this was the seed from which the Jacobin calendar which grew into Bolshevik Newspeak and has gone to seed in the New Left's political correctness sprang.

Now let us consider what Professor Charlton finds specifically objectionable in the “Left are Puritans” meme. Here is his explanation:

OK. But to call the New Left puritans is something only a non-Christian could do, for at least two very obvious reasons.

1. A puritan is very religiously Christian, and believes that this should permeate every aspect of social and personal life.

2. A puritan advocates that sex be confined to (a single, permanent) marriage. In other words, a puritan rejects the entirety of the post-sixties sexual revolution.

Since Leftists are not Christian, and since they are (in theory and in practice) sexual revolutionaries; the idea that Leftists are puritans is wrong.

The first thing to be observed in response to this is that the meme which equates leftism with Puritanism is clearly not meant to be understood as saying that Leftists are like Puritans in every detail. Nobody is suggesting that today’s politically correct, woke, social justice warriors walk around in seventeenth century costume with flat topped hats, ruffed doublets, and buckle shoes, speaking Shakespearean English. It is rather a lazy, shorthand, way of saying “the present day left resembles its ideological ancestor Puritanism in such and such specific characteristics.” All that is being asserted is that in some aspect(s) of today's Left, traits of its distant Puritan ancestors have reasserted themselves in an identifiable manner. This cannot be negated merely by pointing out other areas in which the New Left and Puritanism do not resemble each other or even are the exact opposite of each other.

It could be argued that the differences so outweigh the similarities as to make any focus on the latter unwarranted. This could lead to an interesting discussion on essence and distinction. If the things Professor Charlton states here about the Puritans are of the essence of Puritanism, its sine qua non, without which there can be no Puritanism, as the Professor seems to think, this would, of course, be a strong argument in his favour. I would point out, however, that neither of these things is distinctive of Puritanism. Both could also be said, with equal truth, about orthodox Anglicans and Roman Catholics who were the Puritans' opponents in the conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The meme that compares Leftism to Puritanism must be based upon something that is distinctive to Puritanism as opposed to Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism otherwise it would make no sense and indeed would likely never have existed – a meme would have compared Leftists to Christians in general instead. Can something that is not distinctive of Puritanism be said to be essential to it>

It seems to me that Professor Charlton is operating under a fundamental misunderstanding of Puritanism's reputation. When the present day Left with its political correctness and its zeal for banning such things as guns, single-use plastics, furs and fox-hunting, soft drinks, etc. is described as being Puritanical the comparison is based upon the Puritans' legendary reputation for being dour, gloomy, repressive, Mrs. Grundy-type busybodies, with sticks stuck permanently up their backsides, perpetually nagging and harassing people with a never-ending list of does and don'ts and basically sucking all the happiness out of life like joy-killing vampires. It would appear from Professor Charlton's arguments that he is under the impression that this reputation arose out of their sexual ethics. It is, perhaps, inevitable that this impression would arise and become the natural assumption in our post-Sexual Revolution permissive age but it is without historical basis. The ethic that says that sex, meaning sexual intercourse, should be confined to a single, permanent, marriage was not distinctive of Puritanism but was held and taught by orthodox Anglicans and Roman Catholics as well. Indeed, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, on this matter “the Old Religion was the more austere.” It cannot, therefore, be the source of the Puritans’ reputation.

The Puritans earned their reputation, not by being sticklers for the basic rules of Christian ethics, but for adding and multiplying other rules, ones which often pertained to small, petty, matters, and which had no basis in the Holy Scriptures and were mostly foreign to the Christian tradition. Take their extremely rigid approach to Sunday keeping for example. Christians, since Apostolic times, have met on Sunday, the first day of the week, in commemoration of the Resurrection, for prayer, teaching, and the Eucharist. This tradition is based upon the precedent set by the practice of the Apostolic Church as recorded in the Book of Acts rather than by Scriptural ordinance in the way keeping the Sabbath, Saturday, had been enjoined upon Israel in the Old Testament. This is in keeping with the doctrine of Christian liberty on such matters that was determined at the Jerusalem Council and emphasized by St. Paul throughout his epistles. Early in Christian history it became common to speak of Sunday as the “Christian Sabbath” and to apply the concept of a “day of rest” to it, but orthodox Christianity wanted to avoid repeating the mistake of the Pharisees, the post-Maccabean Revolt sect within the laity of Second Temple Judaism that tried to promote holiness in national Israel by creating a hedge of auxiliary commandments around the Torah which they interpreted so rigidly that they condemned our Lord for performing healing miracles on the Sabbath. The Puritans, however, went much further than the Pharisees for while the Pharisees’ extra rules were at least extrapolated from the actual prohibition in the Fourth Commandment – “thou shalt do no work” - the Puritans’ rules for Sunday were based on the non-Scriptural “thou shalt have no fun.” They forbade all recreational activities on Sundays and wanted the law to enforce this ban. How can this be an example of believing that Christianity “should permeate every aspect of social and personal life” when it is difficult if not impossible to conceive of an attitude further removed from the teachings of Jesus Christ and His Apostles regarding the Sabbath than this?

In this one example we have seen how the Puritans a) imposed a new prohibition that did not belong to ancient Christian tradition and had no basis in Scripture which it completely contradicted in spirit, b) specifically targeted people’s engaging in harmless recreational activities and enjoying themselves, and c) demanded that their new rule be backed by the power of the state. That is the Puritans’ bad reputation in a nutshell. Sexual ethics had nothing to do with it.

Nor was this the only example of this sort of thing. For those who still think it a stretch to compare the politically correct New Left to the Puritans let us not forget that it was Cromwell’s Puritans who launched the original War on Christmas – and on Easter and every other Christian high holy day as well. It is difficult to reconcile a ban on the holy days which make each year a commemorative and celebratory journey through the events of Christ’s earthly ministry from His Incarnation through His Ascension with a desire for Christianity to “permeate every aspect of social and personal life.” Richard Hooker, who thoroughly refuted the shallow theological justification they gave for taking this position decades before they were in a position to enforce it saw their true motives as being economical – less holy days meant more days to make money – although one cannot help but notice that the holy days the Puritans especially objected to were the seasons of celebration that bring joy and mirth into people’s lives.

Nowhere in the world, outside of England during the brief period of Cromwell’s dictatorship, was Puritanism’s influence greater than in colonial English-speaking North America, especially New England, and that influence has been lasting. From the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, itinerant preachers travelled across North America holding special revival services. The preaching in these services was evangelistic and revivalistic, meaning that it called upon unbelievers to become Christians and upon lukewarm or backslidden Christians to repent and practice their faith more seriously and more fervently. Such preaching was also very moralistic and the revivalists in their sermons targeted a long list of sins that one would have a difficult time identifying as such from the Scriptures – playing card games, smoking tobacco, dancing, attending theatrical plays, etc. While other movements, such as the Wesleyan holiness movement, contributed to all of this, its Puritan roots can hardly be denied. Puritan preachers played a leading role in the first wave of revivalism, the Great Awakening, and the non-conformist and dissenting sects that the Puritans had founded were the primary denominations, other than the Methodists, involved in the revivals. The preaching against dancing and the theatre certainly goes back to the Puritans – who infamously shut down London’s theatres, including William Shakespeare’s old Globe Theatre, in 1642 – and while the same cannot be said for every one of these extra-Scriptural “sins,” the general idea behind them all, that something that brings earthly pleasure to people should be suspected of being sinful and probably outright banned, is clearly derived from the same assumptions that led to the original Puritan ban on Sunday recreational activities which, as King James and King Charles both noted in their royal proclamations opposing such bans, amounted to complete bans on recreational activities for the majority of the people.

The revivalist movement often combined its moralism with support for social reform causes that would have been considered progressive in their own day. There is one example of this that is particularly interesting in light of what we are discussing. In the nineteenth century, revivalists became the driving force behind the mislabelled Temperance Movement – mislabelled because “temperance” is the name for the virtue of self-control and implies moderation – by preaching that all consumption of alcoholic beverages in inherently sinful. This is the traditional view of Islam not of Christianity. Indeed, not only does this create a new “sin” not identified as such in the Scriptures it flatly contradicts the Scriptures, Old and New Testaments, including the teachings, commandments, and example of Jesus Christ and His Apostles. The original Puritans had not gone this far – to quote C. S. Lewis “they were not teetotallers; bishops, not beer, were their special aversion” - but there is obviously a reason why within Christendom this movement only ever caught on among the non-conformist sects of North America. After a century of activism, the Temperance Movement succeeded in getting Prohibition – a ban on the production, sale, and consumption of alcohol - passed in both the United States and the Dominion of Canada. As an experiment in moral and social engineering it was a notorious failure.

The Temperance Movement was inseparably intertwined with the suffragette movement, the first wave of feminism that was lobbying to extend the voting franchise to women, and both movements achieved their goals almost simultaneously. The victory of the suffragettes proved more lasting than that of the Temperance Movement and it laid the foundation for the second wave of feminism a few decades and another World War later. The second wave of feminism was as intertwined with the Sexual Revolution as the first wave was with the Temperance Movement. Had Puritanism not laid the foundation for the kind of revivalism that spawned the Temperance Movement, the suffragette movement would never have had the latter to join forces with and may have been less successful in its own goal, and thus failed to pave the way for second wave feminism and the Sexual Revolution.

I have belaboured this point long enough. The people who once locked a man in the stocks for kissing his own wife on his own threshold when he returned from a long sea voyage on Sunday earned their well-deserved reputation for being legalistic killjoys and the fact that they claimed religious motives for doing so in no way invalidates a comparison with the secular ban-happy left-wing control freaks of our own day. Especially when we remember that these schismatic enthusiasts, who objected to the liturgical affirmation of the Nicene Creed but demanded that clergy be made to subscribe to every iota of Theodore Beza’s interpretation of Calvin’s Institutes, who started with a Korah-like rebellion against the Apostolic ministry of the Church and ended by stretching forth their hand against God’s anointed king and shedding his blood, were the original inspiration for the Jacobins and Bolsheviks.

Perhaps we should dust off our copies of Eric Voegelin and give him another read. Anyone who has studied early Church history knows that some of the Gnostics were ascetics who preached and practiced a very austere morality whereas others were hedonistic libertines. These opposite extremes in ethics and behaviour were both derived from the same heretical starting point. It is not so surprising, if Puritanism is revived form of Gnosticism, that it would evolve into a movement with both a permissive and a censorious streak. I will close with C. S. Lewis’ amusing description of progressives who combine both of these traits from a book that came out the same year as The New Science of Politics. In the very first paragraph of the The Voyage of the Dawn Treader we are introduced to Eustace Scrubb and his parents. The latter, whom Eustace addresses by their first names presumably at their own encouragement and whom we find out in the next book in the series send their son to an extremely progressive school called Experiment House that is co-educational, discourages reading the Bible, and is not in any way conducive to any real learning, are the progressives in view:

They were very up-to-date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotallers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.

The Coming(s) of Christ and Some Misconceptions Thereof

We are rapidly approaching Christmas which, as has often been observed, is now two distinct holidays occupying the same space on the civil calendar. One the one hand there is the secular Christmas – or X-mas, as it is known to people who are either politically correct, lazy spellers, or both. This holiday, sacred to the pervasive cult of Mammon, has long been a celebration of two of the Seven Deadly Sins, Avarice and Gluttony, and in more recent years has increasingly added Lust as well. It is preceded by an anticipatory period the length of which is decided by the engines of commerce and which begins when the first decorations and advertisements appear in the stores. While many have opined that it seems to get longer and longer each year, in reality All Saints’ Day is the earliest it can begin. Any earlier and the advertising campaign would clash with that of the secular version of All Hallows’ Eve.

On the other hand there is the Christian Christmas – the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. It too is introduced by a preparatory period, which in Western Christendom we call Advent, but this is much shorter than the season leading up to the secular holiday. It always begins on the Sunday closest to St. Andrew’s Day (November 30th), which is always the fourth Sunday prior to Christmas, and so is never longer than a lunar month. Like Lent, the season leading up to Easter, the liturgical season of Advent is supposed to be a period of sober reflection and repentance. This too is a sharp contrast with the hurly-burly of running around and shopping interspersed with party after party that characterizes the season’s secular counterpart.

While the contempt that such fictional curmudgeons as Ebeneezer Scrooge and the Grinch displayed towards the commercial holiday before their changes of heart is, perhaps, understandable, it is much harder to comprehend the problem that many soi disant Bible-believing Christians seem to have with the religious holiday. Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan dictator of the 1650s, was the spiritual ancestor of these types, as he was of political liberalism and all the various hues and shades of Mrs. Grundyism. You have probably encountered their arguments. The most familiar of them are that December 25th was originally a pagan holiday, that Jesus was not born on December 25th, and that we ought to be keeping the holy days God established in the Bible rather than man made ones. I have dealt with this matter in depth previously and so will provide only a short answer to each of these here.

First of all, yes the date on which the Church chose to celebrate Christmas coincides with a pagan festival. It also coincides with a Jewish festival and while that Jewish festival is also “man made” in that it is not instituted by God anywhere in the Bible, even in the Books of Maccabees that relate the events it commemorates, it was kept by Jesus in the tenth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John. The fourteenth verse of the first chapter of Genesis gives, as God’s stated reason for creating the sun, moon, and stars in addition to dividing day from night and lighting the earth that they might be “for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years” so it should come as no surprise that different religions would have important festivals at approximately the same time, in this case around the winter solstice.

Secondly, since the Scriptures do not tell us the day on which Jesus was born, they neither tell us that He was born on December 25th nor that He was not born on December 25th. The absence of a positive assertion does not constitute a denial. The same principle applies to the argument that because the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Paul did not write it, an argument that a Judaizing acquaintance recently made in a bizarre attempt to bolster his argument that we ought to keep the Old Testament feasts rather than man-made ones like Christmas. (1) At any rate, the question of the actual date on which Jesus was born is moot. Christmas is not necessarily Christ’s “birthday” but a liturgical feast day commemorating His birth. It occurs at the beginning of the liturgical year because that year is organized to take us through the most important events of Christ’s life chronologically. (2)

Finally, the position that Christians ought to be keeping the Old Testament holy days rather than Christmas, Easter, and other feasts appointed by the Church can only be maintained by disregarding the authority of Christ’s Apostles and the New Testament Scriptures. For the New Testament is absolutely clear on this matter. Christians are neither required to keep the feasts, rituals, and ceremonies of the Old Covenant nor forbidden from doing so. The first Christians were Jews who believed in Jesus. When God sent St. Peter to preach the Gospel to a Gentile, Cornelius the centurion, He gave Him a vision in which the dietary laws of the Old Covenant were abrogated. When Gentiles came to be converted in large numbers, a controversy arose as to whether or not they should be circumcised and made to follow all the rituals of the Old Covenant. The Apostles convened a church council in Jerusalem to settle the controversy which ruled against placing these obligations on the Gentile converts. The Book of Acts records that while the original Jewish Christians continued to participate in worship at the Temple and in the synagogues until they were driven out, the Church was already developing its own worship, meeting, for example, on the first day of the week. St. Paul in his epistles encourages these trends and reserves his harshest words for those who would impose the Old Testament rituals on the Church. (3)

This attitude of looking down one’s nose at ordinary Christians for keeping Christmas rather than the Old Testament feasts bears a resemblance in some ways to both of two opposite errors regarding the Second Coming of Christ that have plagued the Church from time to time and which have undergone significant revivals in the last century. For traditional Christian believers the Second Coming is as much in view at this time of year as His first coming. Indeed, while the emphasis of Christmas itself is on the events of His First Coming at Bethlehem a little over two thousand years ago, the emphasis in Advent is on the Second Coming. Whereas the focus of penitent reflection in Lent begins with contemplation of our own mortality on Ash Wednesday and ends with the vicarious suffering and death of Christ on Good Friday, in Advent the focus could be summed up in the words of St. Peter “But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer” (I Pet. 4:7) and of his Master and ours “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.” (Matt. 24:42) For this reason, lectionaries traditionally assign readings that pertain to the Second Coming to this period and the two comings are joined in the Collect for Advent Sunday (4) which is repeated with the other Collects for the duration of Advent.

In their disregard towards the ruling of the Apostolic Council of Jerusalem, the clear teachings of St. Paul, and Apostolic authority in general, the legalistic Judaizers who would deny to Christians the freedom to celebrate, as they have traditionally done, the Person and events of the New Covenant of eternal redemption and bind them back in chains to Mt. Sinai, resemble the date-setters, who have a very similar approach to such statements of Christ as “But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only” and “Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” and “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh.” (Matt. 24: 36, 42, 44). Despite these clear warnings, every time a society collapses, a significant period of time such as a millennium passes, or some other such momentous event occurs, out trot the date-setters with their arguments for why Jesus will return on such-and-such a date. Those among them who are wise guys, despite lacking wisdom, rely on an ultra-literal interpretation of the above verses (only the “day” and “hour” are not mentioned, not the “year” or “decade”) to justify their obvious evasion of the spirit of the text. Needless to say our own era in which Western civilization as a whole has been giving every sign of being on the verge of imminent collapse for a century (5) and the second millennium AD came to an end has had more than its fair share of date-setters.

In their arrogant attitude of superiority towards other Christians, however, the Judaizers more closely resemble the preterists, the hubris of whom make the ancient Gnostics look humble in comparison. Preterism derives its name from the Latin proposition praeter. Praeter means “besides, except for”, “contrary to” and “beyond” but it can also mean “before” in both its spatial and temporal senses. It is in the temporal sense of the meaning “before”, i.e., “in the past”, that the preterists use this word to identify their views. For their doctrine is that all Biblical prophecies – including the prophecies of the Second Coming and the last three of the Quattuor Novissima (6) have all been fulfilled in the past. It is an ancient heresy, having been first taught by Hymenaeus and Philetus in Ephesus towards the end of the sixth decade of the first century AD, and rebuked by St. Paul in his Second Epistle to Timothy:

But shun profane and vain babblings: for they will increase unto more ungodliness. And their word will eat as doth a canker: of whom is Hymenaeus and Philetus; Who concerning the truth have erred, saying that the resurrection is past already; and overthrow the faith of some. (II Tim 2:16-18)

Contemporary preterists attempt to elude the obvious application of these verses to their own doctrine by arguing that at the time St. Paul wrote those words – early in the seventh decade – the resurrection was not yet past but that it happened shortly thereafter, at the very end of that decade, a couple of years after St. Paul’s martyrdom. For contemporary preterists teach that the Second Coming, the Final Resurrection, and the Last Judgment all took place in the year AD 70.

This was the year in which Titus, the son of the newly elevated Roman emperor Vespasian, after a seven month siege of Jerusalem, lay waste to the rebellious city, destroying the Second Temple and apart from the handful of leftover zealots who would be wiped out at Masada three years later, essentially crushed the revolt. The truth in preterism – for heresy is not pure error but begins with a truth being twisted out of shape – is that these events were frequently predicted in the New Testament, sometimes in passages that also discuss the Second Coming. The Olivet Discourse contained in the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth chapters of the Gospel According to St. Matthew is the obvious example. The discourse begins when Jesus tells His disciples that the Temple will be destroyed and they ask Him “Tell us, when shall these things be? and what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?” Orthodox Christianity has always taken the position that the disciples had mistakenly associated the prophecy of the destruction of Jerusalem with the Second Coming of Christ and the end of time and thus asked Jesus two questions, thinking they were asking one. Jesus answered both questions without directly correcting their mistake, knowing that just as the disciples would not be able to grasp that there would be a Second Coming separate and distinct from the First until after His Resurrection and Ascension so the unfolding of events would eventually make obvious the distinction between the destruction of the Temple and His Second Coming. Accordingly the three ancient Creeds which express the consensus of the early, undivided, Apostolic Church as to fundamentals of the orthodox, Scriptural, kerygma all include an affirmation that Christ will “come again with glory to judge both the quick and the dead.” (7)

Orthodox Christians have disagreed on other aspects of eschatology, both in the early centuries and down through the years. Justin Martyr, Irenaeus and Tertullian all taught a form of what is now called pre-millennialism, while the Alexandrian Fathers and St. Augustine taught the a-millennialism that became the dominant view down until modern times. Regardless of where they stood on these matters, however, orthodox Christians joined in the Creedal affirmation of the Second Coming as a literal, future, event that will involve the judgement of the entire world, including both the living and the dead. The preterist teaching that the sack of Jerusalem fulfilled completely the prophecies of the Second Coming and the Final Resurrection and Judgement obviously requires an interpretation of these prophecies that exceeds in its non-literalism what was allowed for by even the most allegorical of the orthodox Fathers. It also requires that the events prophesied be reduced from a global scale and made to pertain only to national Israel. Ironically, since the recent spread of preterism can be partially attributed to a reaction against dispensationalism, preterism shares dispensationalism’s obsession with national Israel, giving it, of course, the opposite negative spin. (8) To both alike, all Bible prophecy is about God wrapping up His dealings with national Israel. To the dispensationalists, this is a future wrapping up that will involve the total restoration of the nation. To the preterists, it is a past wrapping up that involved the total rejection of the nation in judgement for its unbelief. The dispensationalists, at least, affirm the passages in which Christ comes back for His faithful believers, albeit by making it a prelude to the main event. (9) Consistent preterists must insist that passages which speak of the believer’s hope in the coming of the Lord were all fulfilled by the judgement of national Israel. This fact alone ought, in itself, to be sufficient to refute this obviously false doctrine.

The late Lutheran theologian John M. Drickamer once remarked that responding to preterism is like taking out the trash – it is an unpleasant, smelly, task but one that needs to be done from time to time. What better time to do it than Advent, the time in which we traditionally look forward in penitent reflection to Christ’s Second Coming, was we prepare to celebrate His First Coming?

Merry Christmas, every one, and Maranatha (the Lord is coming)!



(1) Actually this case may not be an exact parallel. While the Book of Hebrews does not identify its author, St. Peter may very well have identified St. Paul as its author in II Peter 3:15. In this verse he reminds his original readers, who are the same as those of his first epistle (3:1), that St Paul had written to them something to the effect of “the longsuffering of the Lord is salvation.” All of the “signed” Pauline epistles are addressed to particular churches which were predominantly Gentile. St. Peter’s epistles, on the other hand, are “catholic” or “general” epistles (I Peter 1:1), and his original readers seems to have largely consisted of believers of Jewish ancestry (2:12). Since St. Peter goes on to identify St. Paul’s words as Scripture, Hebrews is the only epistle that seems to qualify as the one to which he is referring. It is part of the New Testament canon, written to the same addressees, with content that matches the allusion by St. Peter (see the ninth and tenth chapters of Hebrews).

(2) See, however, William J. Tighe’s arguments in Touchstone Magazine, that the early Church calculated December 25th and January 6th (Epiphany, the Twelfth Day of Christmas, celebrated in Western Christendom as the Feast of the Magi, in the East as the eve of Christmas itself) as the dates of Christ’s birth by adding nine months to March 25th and April 6th respectively. According to Tighe there was a widespread belief at the time that Israel’s prophets died on the same date as their conception, and so March 25th and April 6th were identified as the dates of conception through attempts to calculate the calendar date of Christ’s death. Tighe also maintains that the Church had done these calculations and started celebrating Christmas on December 25th prior to AD 274 when Emperor Marcus Aureleus declared the same date to be the “Birth of the Unconquered Sun.”

(3) He develops a theological argument for this doctrine of Christian liberty throughout his corpus, but especially in the epistles of Romans, Galatians, Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, and Hebrews. The Old Testament Law in its ceremonial aspect pointed to and foreshadowed Christ, now that Christ has appeared and instituted the New Covenant with His blood we, having the substance, ought not to cling to the shadow. Under the Old Covenant, Israel was to be a holy nation. She was supposed to remain untainted with the paganism and idolatry of the tribes and nations surrounding her, and the ceremonial aspects of the Law, including the dietary and clothing restrictions, contributed to her distinct and separate identity. Under the New Covenant, however, believers of all nations are united spiritually in the Church, and this unity is symbolized by the Church’s standing under grace rather than Law.

(4) “ALMIGHTY God, give us grace that we may cast away the works of darkness, and put upon us the armour of light, now in the time of this mortal life, in which thy Son Jesus Christ came to visit us in great humility; that in the last day, when he shall come again in his glorious majesty to judge both the quick and the dead, we may rise to the life immortal, through him who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, now and ever. Amen.” Collect for First Sunday in Advent, Book of Common Prayer.

(5) It is one hundred years since the first volume of Oswald Spengler’s Der Untergang des Abendlandes – The Decline – more accurately “Downfall” of the West – was published.

(6) Four Last Things – Death, Judgement, Heaven, Hell.

(7) This is the wording of the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed as translated in the BCP. The Apostles’ Creed and the Quicumque Vult both introduce the Second Coming by saying that Jesus is seated at the right hand of the Father after which the Apostles’ Creed adds “from thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead” and the Athanasian Creed adds “from whence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead. At whose coming all men shall rise again with their bodies: and shall give account for their own works. And they that have done good shall go into life everlasting: and they that have done evil into everlasting fire.”

(8) Interestingly there are other parallels. Both doctrines in their contemporary forms can be traced back to sixteenth century Jesuits (Luis de Alcasar in the case of preterism, Francisco Ribera in the case of dispensationalism) through nineteenth century Protestant popularizers (James Stuart Russell’s The Parousia: a Critical Inquiry into the New Testament Doctrine of Our Lord's Second Coming in the case of preterism, John Nelson Darby and C. I. Scofield in the case of dispensationalism).

(9) The main problem with dispensationalism, from the standpoint of orthodox theology, is not their elaborate eschatological scheme but the significance attached to certain of the events. The rapture (from the Latin equivalent of the Greek ἁρπάζω used by St. Paul to mean “caught up” in I Thess. 4:17) is said by dispensationalists to the be the end of the Church Age which began at Pentecost, and the entire Church Age is described by dispensationalists as a parenthesis in the Age of the Law. This is the opposite of inspired Apostolic doctrine in which the Law is the parenthesis in the unfolding of God’s promises of grace (Gal. 3:6-29, NB especially vv. 17, 19, 23-25).

Thoughts on the Times

Smoking Stupidity

The solons who govern the city of Winnipeg in which I reside have, in their inscrutable wisdom, ruled, that as of April 1st, no one is to be allowed to smoke in outdoor patios where food and beverages are served. Although set to come into effect on April Fool’s Day, sadly, this fascist bylaw, is no joke. This latest and most absurd assault, in the neopuritan war on tobacco, is, like previous ones, based on the myth of harmful and deadly second-hand smoke. Undoubtedly, many if not most of the dingbats championing this ban are the same people applauding the federal Liberals’ decision, also coming into effect this year, to legalize the recreational smoking of the flowers and leaves of non-industrial hemp. Tobacco smoking can over time be damaging to the health of the body. The risk is much higher for cigarette smokers than for those who smoke tobacco the way God intended it in pipes and cigars, although this distinction and difference means nothing to the Mrs. Grundys of the Winnipeg City Council. Cannabis smoking damages the health of the mind. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again:

Heed my advice if you wish to stay sane;
If you smoke, smoke Old Toby and not Mary Jane.

Remember S. Charles, King and Martyr

Yesterday was the Feast of King Charles the Martyr, murdered by the regicidal and heretical, Puritan sect 369 years ago. The December 2017 edition of the American Region Edition of SKCM News, the Magazine of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, contains this item:

BBC History magazine has published a seventeenth-century recipe for drinking chocolate. Charles I enjoyed the beverage, but Oliver Cromwell banned it, deeming it sinful. (p. 3)

Yet further evidence, as if more were needed, that Puritanism is evil. In addition to being Pharisees, the Puritans were also Philistines and in the Interregnum, they broke up King Charles’ impressive collection of art and sold most of it off. The Telegraph reports that with the help of the Royal Martyr’s namesake, the present Prince of Wales, the Royal Academy of Arts has reassembled the collection for the first time in almost four centuries, for a special show commemorating the Academy’s 250th anniversary.

Some Quotes from a Church Father

St. Irenaeus was a second century Church Father. He was born and raised in Smyrna, in what is now Turkey, when St. Polycarp, who had been the disciple of St. John the Apostle, was bishop there. Later he served, first as presbyter (priest) then as bishop, in what is now Lyon in France. He is most remembered as a defender of Apostolic orthodoxy against the various Gnostic sects that taught that the God of the Old Testament Who created the heavens and the earth was an inferior deity, the Demiurge, and not the Father of the New Testament. Eric Voegelin argued, in The New Science of Politics, that in Calvinist Puritanism, Gnosticism had been revived and had evolved into the spirit of the Modern Age.

St. Irenaeus wrote a five-book treatise against the Gnostics which in Latin is titled Adversus Haereses. The first book outlines the teachings of several varieties of Gnosticism, focusing primarily on the Valentinian sect. In the second paragraph of the twenty-fourth chapter of this book can be found this remark about a different Gnostic sect, the followers of Saturninus:

Many of those, too, who belong to his school, abstain from animal food, and draw away multitudes by a feigned temperance of this kind.

Later, of yet another Gnostic sect, the Encratites, he writes:

Some of those reckoned among them have also introduced abstinence from animal food, thus proving themselves ungrateful to God, who formed all things. (I.28.1)

Sadly, there has been a great deal of ignorance of and indifference to the Patristic writings among Western Protestants for the last century or so which perhaps explains the revival and popularity of the Gnostic heresy of vegan vegetarianism in our day and age.

A Quote From Our Friends Down Under

The Australian traditionalist and reactionary group Sydney Trads, in its “The Year in Review: 2017, Year of the Hate Hoax, the Heckler’s Veto and the Persecuted ‘Oppressor’”, included the following:

2017 was the year of Schrodinger’s ethnicity: Whites apparently exist as an identifiable category if they are being attacked, mocked, ridiculed or blamed for something, but also do not exist as a legitimate category of self-identification when a representative defends their interests as a group.

That is liberalism’s essential self-contradiction on race all summed up in a nutshell. Nicely done.

Justin Trudeau’s Nightmare

In the 1860s, the Fathers of Confederation formed a new country out of the provinces of British North America, giving it the title of Dominion and the name of Canada. The new country was to be a federation of provinces, with a parliamentary government modeled after the Westminster parliament, under the monarchy shared with Great Britain and the rest of the British Empire. The Fathers of Confederation looked to the federal system to overcome the difficulties of British Protestants and French Catholics living together in one country and to the monarchy as the source of continuity and unity, envisioned the evolution of the British Empire itself into a federation in which Canada would play a senior role, and tried to protect their country from the gravitational pull of the republic to their south with a national economic program of protective tariffs and internal trade facilitated by the construction of a transcontinental railroad. From that time to today, the Liberal Party of Canada has been the anti-Confederation party, the party that has sought to belittle the accomplishments of the Fathers of Confederation and Canada’s Loyalist heritage, to line the pockets of its financial backers through increased trade with the United States up to the point of continental economic integration, to weaken our parliamentary constitution and give autocratic power to the Prime Minister and Cabinet, to replace our traditional national symbols with ones of their own manufacture and to seriously undermine our traditional Common Law rights and freedoms. The Liberal Party found out in 1891 and again in 1911 that presenting their naked agenda to Canadians at election time was a losing strategy and evolved the strategy of pandering and grievance mongering that worked much better for them in the twentieth century. The strategy consists of telling identifiable groups that the Old Canada of Confederation had treated them unfairly but that if they would give their support to the Liberals, the Liberals would fix the situation and give them a bag of taxpayer-supplied goodies.

At first it was French Canadians that Liberals focused on, telling them that all the Britishness of the Canada of a Confederation was an unfair reminder of their defeat at the Plains of Abraham. This was nonsense – French Canadians knew full well that the protection of the British Crown had secured their language, religion, and culture for them when the Puritan Americans had wanted to take them away from them and their leaders were fully involved in the Confederation talks, helping shape the Dominion. The Liberal strategy had an unintended consequence – the emergence of the Quebec nationalist separatism that threatened to divide the country.

When this happened the Liberals adjusted their strategy. They now told a broad, “rainbow coalition” of different races, religions, and ethnic groups that they had been unfairly “excluded” from the Old Canada of Confederation, but would receive redress in the New Canada of the Liberal Party. To ensure that the coalition was as large as possible they revamped the immigration system, bringing in the race-neutral points system of 1965 as our “official” immigration policy, but this was merely a cover for their true policy of exploiting the loopholes to the points system (the largest of these being “family reunification”) to make Canada as ethnically diverse as possible as quickly as possible. They, of course, silenced anybody who pointed out the obvious drawbacks to this by calling him a “racist.”

This was done largely during the premiership of Pierre Trudeau. Now, in the premiership of Justin Trudeau, the Liberal coalition has been expanded to include minority sexual orientations and gender identities as well.

This strategy has always been a divisive one, first pitting French Canadians against English Canadians, then pitting a coalition of racial, religious, and ethnic minorities against European Christian Canadians, and maximizing diversity in total disregard to the fact that this is the way to generate ethnic and racial strife and conflict rather than harmony. It has been quite clear for some time now that the Liberal coalition cannot hold together for long. Earlier in the premiership of the second Trudeau it seemed likely that the breaking point would be between Muslims and the alphabet soupers, both of whose causes the Prime Minister was loudly, vehemently, and recklessly championing despite the obvious contradiction between the two. Now, however, a different fracture has become evident.

Earlier this month, the Prime Minister shamelessly turned the occasion of a young Muslim girl in Toronto, Khawlah Noman’s, claim that she had been attacked by a man who cut her hijab with scissors, into an opportunity to grandstand, get his name and picture in the press yet again, and lecture Canadians about how horribly “Islamophobic” we all are. It later turned out that, like the vast majority of highly publicized “hate crimes”, the incident was a hoax and had not occurred after all. Those who have been waiting for Trudeau to return to his taxpayer-funded soap box and eat crow have been listening to crickets chirp and watching the tumbleweeds drift by ever since.

This weekend, however, protests were held all across Canada by the Asian communities of cities such as Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Regina. It turns out that it was an Asian man whom the girl had falsely accused – a detail that was not widely reported by the press as it conflicts with their narrative in which bigotry and bigotry-inspired-violence are the exclusive domain of white, heterosexual, Christian males. The protests were aimed at Trudeau, insisting that the hoax, and his gullible swallowing it without waiting for a full investigation, constituted a “hate crime” against them. While I have little sympathy for the protestors, as their claim that they were being scapegoated and discriminated against is ludicrous seeing that the school division, the federal and provincial governments, the leaders of the opposition, and the news media all went out of their way to avoid drawing attention to the fact that the girl had accused one of their ethnicity, there is something deeply satisfying in seeing Trudeau’s coalition fall apart, and its members turn on him.

The Other War On Christmas

The war on Christmas, as that expression is usually understood, denotes the recent North American phenomenon in which progressive forces, in the name of diversity, tolerance, multiculturalism and all those other words which serve little other purpose than to hide the spirit of Stalinist totalitarianism behind a smiley face, have sought to re-brand Christmas into a generic “holiday season”. This war is conducted on many fronts and with varying degrees of intensity, ranging from the replacement of the traditional “Merry Christmas” greeting with “Happy Holidays” or something similar to the more heavy-handed attempts by lobby groups and civil liberties organizations to drive nativity scenes and any other Christmas imagery that has a direct and obvious connection to Christianity from the public square. Back in the 1990s, Peter Brimelow and John O’Sullivan began a war against Christmas contest in National Review, to see who could find the most outrageous example of an attempt to suppress the Feast of the Nativity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ and put a cheap generic imitation in its place and Brimelow has continued this tradition on his immigration reform website VDare. VDare has done an excellent job of documenting this sort of thing and so we will here turn to look at the other war on Christmas, i.e., that conducted by those who consider themselves to be the faithful, against Christmas, in the name of what they consider to be a sound interpretation of the Bible.



The roots of this other war on Christmas go back to the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century. The Reformation began as a response to corruption in the Roman Catholic Church. Pope Leo X had authorized a campaign in which indulgences would be offered in return for funds that would go to the reconstruction of St. Peter’s Basilica. This crass effort to sell the grace of God, offended Dr. Martin Luther of the University of Wittenberg, who challenged not only the vulgar indulgence peddling of Johann Tetzel, but the theology that lay behind the very idea of indulgences, on the grounds of the Pauline doctrine of justification by grace through faith, and, when summoned by the Church to defend himself against charges of heresy, insisted that it is to the Holy Scriptures, as the written Word of God, that the teachings and traditions of the Church must be held accountable.



Dr. Luther had nothing against Christmas, or against most of the traditions of the Church for that matter, but the ball he started rolling picked up momentum which carried it much further than he had ever intended. The Reformation divided Western Europe, in which nation-states had begun to develop in the earlier Renaissance period. Of these, for the most part those with a Latin-based language, like French, Italian, and Spanish, remained Roman Catholic while the national churches in the northern states, with German-based languages, tended to follow one or the other of the Protestant Reformers. There were Protestants, however, who were convinced that Luther, Calvin, and even Zwingle had not gone far enough, who condemned Christendom and its traditions and institutions as hopelessly corrupt, denouncing both the Roman Catholic and the Protestant national churches and who formed sects in which only those whom they considered to be pure in doctrine and lifestyle were welcome, regarding their own sects as God’s elect remnant, and everyone else as being corrupt.



Protestant sectarianism continued to develop further and further away from the mainstream of Christian tradition and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, radical Protestant sects developed, like the Rutherfordian Russellites and the Armstrongists which went so far as to reject Nicene Trinitarian orthodoxy itself, generally reviving one or another of the ancient heresies in the process. Both the Russellites and the Armstrongists condemned Christmas as a pagan invention of the “Catholic Church” which in their view was a counterfeit church created by Emperor Constantine in the fourth century.



This same anti-Christmas view had developed in radical Protestantism much earlier than this, however, by individuals who did not go so far as to reject the Trinity. In the sixteenth century, many of the English Protestants who had introduced moderate reforms in the Church of England during the reign of Edward VI, fled to Switzerland during the reign of the Catholic Mary, and there became much more radical in their Calvinism. When these returned to England, during the reign of Elizabeth I, who had restored the Edwardian reforms, they found these did not go far enough to please them. They demanded that every practice and institution from the pre-Reformation tradition of the Church for which they could not find a text in the Holy Scriptures commanding or authorizing its use be removed from the Church as superstition and popery. Against these fanatics, who came to be known as Puritans, the theologian Richard Hooker, defended the Elizabethan Church of England in his eight volume Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity, arguing that the Church was at liberty to retain whatever traditional practices and institutions were not explicitly forbidden or condemned in the Holy Scriptures, a view far more compatible with the Pauline doctrine of Christian liberty than that of the Puritans, although the latter liked to think of themselves as the champions of Christian liberty against a “legalistic” Church. When neither Elizabeth I, nor her Stuart successors James I and Charles I, were willing to give in to their demands, they became increasingly seditious and in the 1640s their rebellion against King Charles I broke out into the English Civil War. They captured the king, had him put on trial before a Parliament from which all but their own supporters had been removed by military force, and executed him. They installed their general, Oliver Cromwell as Lord Protector of Britain, whose tyrannical regime lasted until his death in 1658, shortly after which the crown was restored to Charles II.


During his mercifully brief dictatorship, Cromwell sought to remove everything that brought the slightest amount of colour, light, and earthly happiness into people's lives. He banned games and amusements on Sundays - the only day of the week people were not working from dawn to dusk, stripped the churches of ornamentation and beautiful organ music, forcing everyone to listen to horrible extra long sermons all Sunday morning, shut down theatres, and outlawed Christmas as pagan.

What was Cromwell's problem? Dr. Seuss once speculated concerning a fictional character who bore a remarkable resemblance to Cromwell "It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight. It could be his head wasn't screwed on just right. But I think that the most likely reason of all may have been that his heart was two sizes too small." In the case of the real-life, seventeenth century Grinch, Cromwell, whatever role his head and shoes might have played, the problem was that his heart, soul, and spirit had been shrunk, frozen, and killed by a form of extreme Calvinism that combined a Pharisaical spirit regarding religion with a philistine attitude to culture in what was the most repulsive and vile, hell-spawned theology to claim the name of Christianity in vain, until theological modernism began to be spewed forth from the German schools of higher criticism and the North American "social gospel" movement in the nineteenth century.


Unfortunately, the spirit of Cromwellian Puritanism has survived in the misguided zealots who come out every year at this time to inform us that the first five verses of Jeremiah 10 condemn Christmas trees, even though anyone with an IQ over thirty can see that the reference to removing a tree from the forest and decking it with silver and gold is describing the construction of an idol, not something that is purely celebratory and decorative in purpose and function. They also like to remind us that December 25th was the day in which the Romans celebrated the birth of Sol Invictus at the conclusion of the pagan festival of lights, Saturnalia, concluding through some leap of reasoning that it was therefore pagan and idolatrous for the Church to have set the feast day celebrating the birth of the Son of the Living God on this same day. This sort of reasoning, however, would also condemn St. John the Apostle for introducing Jesus as the "Logos" in his Gospel. The idea of the Logos, the Divine Word or Reason, comes right out of pagan Greek philosophy. As the Hellenized first century Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria pointed out, there was a parallel concept in the "memra", the personalized Word or Wisdom of God of the Targum, the Aramaic rabbinic commentary on the Hebrew Scriptures, and it is quite in keeping with the New Testament concept that Christ abolished the division between Jews and Gentiles in establishing His Covenant and His Church, to understand the Logos of the Gospel to draw from both the Greek and Jewish antecedents. Interestingly, the Jews then, as now, also celebrated a "Festival of Lights", around the winter solstice, commemorating the rededication of the Temple, after its desecration by Antiochus Epiphanes and the Maccabean revolt that ensued. Jesus, according to the tenth chapter of the Gospel of John, went to Jerusalem for this festival, also called the Feast of the Dedication or Hanukkah, even though this feast would be regarded as extra-scriptural by Puritan theology which does not accept the First and Second books of Maccabees as Holy Scriptures. If there is nothing wrong with St. John synthesizing the Greek logos and the Jewish memra in his doctrine of the pre-incarnate Christ as the Word Who was in the beginning with God, and Who was God, and through Whom all things were made, then there is nothing wrong with the Church deciding to celebrate the birth of God's Son, at a time of year which coincides with both the Roman and the Jewish festivals of lights. Indeed, it seems most appropriate.

There is a connection between the two wars on Christmas in that Puritanism, as Eric Voegelin pointed out, was an early stage of the modern revival of Gnosticism, of which the progressive liberalism of the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries are later stages. You can read all about that in Voegelin's The New Science of Politics. The original Gnostics, I would note, were the anti-Christs that St. John referred to in his epistles, who denied the doctrine of Christ, specifically the Incarnation, which, of course, is the theological event commemorated in Christmas. The war on Christmas, in its Puritan and progressive liberal forms, is ultimately a war on the Apostolic doctrine of Christ as defended and articulated by the orthodox in the Trinitarian confession of the Council of Nicaea.

So, let me conclude by wishing you all a very Merry Christmas in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

The Martyred King

True son of our dear Mother, early taught
With her to worship and for her to die,
Nursed in her aisles to more than kingly thought,
Oft in her solemn hours we dream thee nigh. – John Keble, “Charles Stuart, King and Martyr”, from The Christian Year

The word saint, has several different uses, but one basic meaning. It comes from the Latin word sanctus, which means holy, and it means “holy one”. This much everyone agrees on. It is when we come to the question of who is a saint or a holy one that disagreements arise. There is a kind of secular concept within Western culture of a “saint” as an extremely good person. In this sense of the term holiness is equated with goodness. Within the Christian faith, the term saint is sometimes used as a synonym for Christian, to refer to any believer in Jesus Christ. This use of the term is derived from the New Testament itself and reflects the original root meaning of the Greek and Latin words for holy, that of being consecrated or set apart. Believers in Jesus Christ are holy in the sense of being called out of the world, set aside, and consecrated for God. Many Protestant Christians recognize only this use of the word saint. Other Christians, including Roman Catholics, Eastern Orthodox, Anglicans, and Lutherans, while recognizing this use of the word saint, also use it in another way. In this other use, saint is a title bestowed upon a person as a way of saying that the Church officially recognizes his holiness.

Some Protestants object to this use of the term saint on the grounds that it is not the way the New Testament uses the word but I disagree. The New Testament does declare that all believers in Christ have been sanctified, i.e., made holy, consecrated to God, by the blood of Jesus Christ. It also declares specific individuals to be holy – like John the Baptist (Mark 6:20), the prophets (Luke 1:70, Acts 13:21, 2 Peter 1:21, 3:2, Revelation 22:6), and the apostles (Ephesians 3:5, Revelation 18:20). One of the books which calls the prophets and apostles holy also says that only God is holy (Revelation 15:4) indicating that either the Apostle John and the martyrs to whom he attributes the statement that only God is holy are in disagreement, or that the word holy has different senses in different contexts, one of which can only be rightly attributed to God, another of which can be ascribed to men like the apostles and prophets. The latter is the correct inference. As T. S. Eliot wisely said “We should not try to pin a word down to one meaning, which it should have at all times, in all places, and for everybody.” (1) The New Testament calls all believers saints but it does not contain an injunction forbidding the Church from doing what it does itself, applying the same term in a more limited sense to specific persons. After the Reformation, a major difference of opinion arose among the reformed Churches, regarding Church traditions. Some said that unless a traditional belief or practice can be shown to be found in and authorized by Scripture it should be abandoned. Others argued that unless a traditional belief or practice is said to be wrong or forbidden by Scripture it should be retained and honoured. Among English-speaking reformed Christians, the latter was the position of the Church of England, defended by the Elizabethan era Anglican divine Richard Hooker in his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. The former was the position of the Puritans whom Hooker argued against.

It is perversely appropriate therefore, that the Puritans were the ones who persecuted and martyred the man who is our subject today, the only man every canonized a saint by the Church of England after she was removed from under the authority of Rome. The canonization took place at the convocation of the ecclesiastical provinces of Canterbury and York in 1660, during the Restoration that followed the English Civil War and the Puritan protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. The man canonized as saint was Charles Stuart, who had reigned over England and Scotland as King Charles I until he was murdered by the Puritans on January 30, 1649.

Charles I was the second member of the House of Stuart to reign over England. The Stuarts had ruled Scotland ever since Robert Stewart, grandson of Robert the Bruce through his daughter Marjorie, succeeded his uncle David II as king in 1371. Prior to Robert II’s accession to the throne his ancestors had held the title High Steward of Scotland for six generations, from which the family’s patronym was derived. Charles’ father James, was already James VI of Scotland when he inherited the throne of England in 1603, upon the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth I was the third and last child of Henry VIII, and when she, like her brother Edward and sister Mary, died without issue, the House of Tudor became extinct and the line of succession reverted back to the descendents of Margaret Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister and the daughter of Henry VII. Margaret had married James IV of Scotland, their son was James V, whose daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots, was the mother of James VI.

The House of Stuart inherited its problem with the Puritans from the House of Tudor. Parliament, under Henry VIII, had passed the Act of Supremacy in 1534 which declared the king to be the highest earthly authority over the Church of England, effectively removing it from under the authority of the Pope. This was not done out of sympathy with the doctrines of Martin Luther and John Calvin and the Church of England at first was little different after the Act than it had been before the Act. Later in Henry VIII’s reign other reforms were started. He authorized the production of an official English translation of the Bible for use in the Church, which came out in 1539 as The Great Bible. Thomas Cranmer, whom he had made Archbishop of Canterbury, also began work on an English language version of the liturgy. This became the Book of Common Prayer, the first edition of which came out in 1549, a couple of years after the death of Henry VIII during the reign of his son Edward VI. Edward, unlike his father, was a Protestant in doctrine, and, although he was in his minority for the duration of his brief reign, under him Cranmer, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Ridley introduced further reforms, including an explicitly Protestant confession of faith. When Edward died at age 15, the throne passed, despite his efforts to install a Protestant cousin, Lady Jane Grey, to his Roman Catholic sister Mary, who repealed the Act of Supremacy, reversed the reforms of her father and brother, and had Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley – among many others – burned at the stake. When she died childless in 1558 the throne then went to her Protestant sister Elizabeth. By this time, the polarization over religion threatened the stability of the government. Protestants had fled the realm during the persecutions of “Bloody Mary” to find refuge in places like Calvin’s, Geneva. Now under Elizabeth it was the Catholics who were fleeing to places like France and Spain and the Protestants were returning. Unfortunately, during their exile they had come under the influence, not merely of the Reformer’s better teachings like the authority of Scripture as the Word of God and justification by faith, but of more radical and obnoxious doctrines as well. Among these doctrines, popular in Calvin’s Geneva, were presbyterianism, the idea of getting rid of the bishops that had governed the Church since the Apostolic era and putting the governance of the Church in the hands of synods of presbyters, and anti-monarchical, seditious, republicanism. Thus, when Elizabeth became Queen, she had to deal with both Catholics who opposed her restoration of the reforms of her father and brother and Protestants who demanded that she get rid of the bishops and everything ritualistic, ceremonial and traditional that they objected to. Her response was to say that the Church would keep its bishops, rituals, and ceremonies, that it would follow the Book of Common Prayer, and adopt the Protestant Thirty-Nine Articles as its doctrinal confession, and that bishops and priests would be free to interpret its doctrines in as Catholic or Protestant a way as they liked, so long as they did not rock the boat, in which case they would be dealt with mercilessly. The Elizabethan Settlement was an ingenious attempt to split the difference between the wisdom of Solomon and the man who put on the colours of both sides in a war and got shot at by both.

This was the situation in England when the throne passed to the Scottish House of Stuart. The situation in Scotland was a bit different. There, the established Church had gone much further in the way of Calvinistic reforms. The bishops had been abolished and the Church had been given a presbyterian government. It was because of this that the English radical Protestants, who are known in history as the Puritans because of their desire to purify the Church and society of all they considered to be unbiblical, initially thought they had an ally in the new king who already reigned over a presbyterian country. They were very much mistaken. The new James I of England, as James VI of Scotland, had already tasted of the fruit of Puritanism. He had been baptized in the Roman Catholic Church which was the Church of his parents, Mary, Queen of Scots and her husband Lord Darnley. Before his first birthday his father was murdered and his mother was arrested by Protestant radicals. He never saw his mother again. She was forced to abdicate and he, crowned king at age one, was removed from her custody so that he would be raised as a Protestant. He was brought up under the tutelage of brutal presbyterian masters. He was captured and held prisoner for about a year by presbyterian noblemen when he was sixteen years old. When he inherited the throne of England he was already developed a strong dislike for extreme Protestantism. The Puritans, therefore, when they sent him the Millenary Petition as he travelled to London to claim his new throne, requesting that he abolish the sign of the cross in baptism, the rite of confirmation, the term priest, wedding rings and vestments, bowing at the name Jesus, etc., were already fated to be disappointed. He called the Hampton Court Conference for early 1604 to which he invited Puritan representatives and bishops of the Church of England. He allowed the Puritans to present their requests and the bishops to present counterarguments and then proceeded to deny their requests. The one exception was the request for a new authorized translation of the Bible. This he approved because he disliked the presbyterian and republican marginal notes of the then popular Geneva Bible. He was convinced that presbyterianism was the ally of republicanism while episcopalianism was allied to the reign of kings.

If it could be argued that James support for the Anglican status quo was politically motivated the same cannot be said for his son. Charles was baptized into the Church of England and raised in the Anglican faith – the first British monarch of whom this can be said. He was personally devout and when he refused to give in to Puritan demands it was for a sincerely held theological belief in the necessity of bishops in Apostolic succession.

“Rightly was King Charles surnamed the Martyr”, wrote Benjamin Disraeli, “for he was the holocaust of direct taxation.” He then went on to say “Never yet did man lay down his heroic life for so great a cause: the cause of the Church and the cause of the poor.” (2)

Disraeli wrote this assessment of King Charles in his novel Sybil which was first published in 1845. This was not typical of the way the martyred king was treated by the historians of Disraeli’s century. The nineteenth century was the era of triumphant liberalism. Liberalism, the ideology which encapsulated the spirit of the Modern Age, was born out of the anti-Christian doctrines of the Enlightenment Project. It championed the “liberty” of the individual against the traditional authority of kings and the Church only to bind the individual in slavery to the omnipotent State. In the English-speaking world liberalism’s pedigree went back, through the Whig Party of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the Puritan Roundheads who deposed and murdered King Charles I. Naturally, therefore, the Whig historians of the nineteenth century were not inclined to include sympathetic interpretations of the king in their histories.

In the Whig interpretation of history King Charles was a tyrant, who sought to overturn the constitution of England, abrogate the rights and privileges of Parliament, and to impose his own arbitrary will upon the country. This interpretation is, like virtually every other idea liberals have ever come up with, pure nonsense.

Charles, like his father, believed in the Divine Right of Kings. Liberals see this doctrine as being a justification for autocratic government. This, however, reveals the anti-Christian, rationalistic thinking that is at the heart of liberalism. The doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings asserts that rulers derive their authority directly from God to Whom they are accountable. To say that this doctrine promotes autocratic government is to assert one’s practical atheism. For if we believe in the existence of an Almighty, Holy, God, Who holds men accountable in this world and for all eternity, the idea that kings derive their authority from and are accountable to Him is a strong deterrent rather than an incentive to tyrannical behaviour on the part of the king. It is a much stronger deterrent to tyranny than the liberal doctrine that government derives its authority from “the consent of the people”. (3)

It is, in fact, liberal, democratic theory that is the true recipe for tyranny. It actually removes inhibitions on the government’s powers to tax and legislate. If the government is the voice of the people, after all, whenever it uses those powers it is the people who are taxing and legislating themselves. This is not sophistry, it is borne out by the history of the last three centuries. As Western governments have grown more democratic, they have also grown exponentially, as have the laws which they have introduced, laws which now intrude into people’s private lives and businesses in ways that would have been unthinkable before modern democracy. Taxation has also become far more oppressive. Disraeli said that the death of King Charles was “the holocaust of direct taxation.” When Disraeli spoke of direct taxation he was referring to taxes levied directly by the sovereign as opposed to those which were created by the elected assembly. His claim that the taxes King Charles raised directly without Parliamentary consent were fairer than those imposed by Parliament was based upon the fact that the wealthy paid the former and the poor paid the latter. This was, in fact, the case, but there is an even stronger case to be made. The tax system that has evolved after the Crown was weakened and most of its powers transferred to the assembly brings in government revenue in much larger amounts, through taxes at much higher rates, collected in a much more oppressive way, than those conceived of by any feudal king.

This is quite easily demonstrable. Today, when we speak of direct and indirect taxation, we do not refer to the difference Disraeli had in mind but to the difference between taxes imposed directly upon a person and his livelihood, of which the income tax is the obvious example, and taxes which consist of charges added to economic transactions, such as tariffs and sales taxes. It should be fairly obvious that in this usage, direct taxation is the more oppressive of the two. To raise revenue through an income tax a government requires a large, permanent, tax bureaucracy which keeps extensive records on the employment, earnings, and spending habits of its citizens. It is by far the most oppressive form of taxation ever devised by man. It is like the tribute which the Romans demanded of the peoples they conquered as a symbol of their submission except that it is imposed by governments upon their own people. It is the creation of democratic governments and it was only in the last century that it became the norm throughout the Western world.

The reason many people do not recognize that the income tax, requiring them to turn over a percentage of their income each year to a government that keeps tabs on where they work, for whom, how much money they make, and how they spend it, is an unprecedentedly high and oppressive tax is the same reason why they do not recognize mandatory seat belt laws and other nanny-state regulations for the unprecedented government intrusion into their daily lives that they are. We can call it the “Brave New World” effect.

Tyranny consists of two elements. The first is the usurpation of authority, either by using force to seize an office of power for one’s self or by assuming to one’s office powers which did not previously belong to it. The second is the abuse of authority by harsh treatment of those under it. Neither of these elements was present in the reign of Charles I, except in the actions of the Puritans. Charles inherited his throne legitimately and, while some of his actions would be unconstitutional if committed by a monarch today, they did not violate the constitution in his own day.

Charles became king on March 27, 1625. On May 1st of that year he was married by proxy, to Henrietta Maria, the youngest sister of King Louis XIII of France, in Notre Dame Cathedral. On June 13th, he married her again in person, in Canterbury. Henrietta Maria was a Roman Catholic and, in the treaty with France in which the marriage was arranged, Charles had agreed that she would be allowed to remain a Catholic and to practice her religion freely. Charles also promised his new brother-in-law’s prime minister, Cardinal Armand du Plessis, Duc de Richelieu, that he would grant freedom of religion to the Roman Catholic recusants. It would take a rather sick mind to see these promises of religious freedom for Catholics as a threat to impose popery on the rest of the country. That, however, was the way the Puritans saw it and they, unfortunately, had a lot of clout in Parliament, which Charles called together five days after his marriage.

It did not have to be that way. John Williams, who had been appointed Bishop of Lincoln and Lord Keeper by King James, advised King Charles “to postpone calling parliament until his friends had time to ensure the election of trustworthy candidates.” (4) Charles ignored this suggestion, preferring to take the opposite advice from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Buckingham had been King James’ favourite before he became Charles’ and, although the title and office did not yet exist, he was to all intents and purposes the Prime Minister of Britain until his assassination by Puritan John Felton in 1628. He was also a complete idiot and the advice he gave Charles was generally of the worst possible sort. Two years earlier, he had talked Charles into travelling incognito with him to Madrid, to attempt to woo the Infanta Maria, the youngest daughter of Philip III of Spain. The adventure was a disaster and when the two returned home, Buckingham urged war with Spain. Early the following year he got his way when, with Parliament enthusiastically behind the idea, James reluctantly declared war on Spain. Thus, upon Charles’ accession to the throne, Buckingham urged him to convene Parliament as soon as possible to obtain the necessary funds to fight the war.

Well, that went over like a ton of bricks. The House of Commons voted Charles two subsidies, but these were insufficient to cover the expenses of the war which the House itself had overwhelmingly supported the year previously. Then, to make matters worse, they voted to grant Charles tonnage and poundage for one year.

Tonnage and poundage were customs duties, charged mostly on imported wine. For three centuries these had been collected as part of the royal revenue and it was customary for Parliament to grant these to the king for life at the beginning of his reign. For the Commons to restrict the grant to one year was a major insult. The insult was intensified by the fact that it was tacked on at the end of the session, when most of the House had gone home, having voted for the insufficient subsidies after having side-tracked the discussion for several days with a harangue against Romanism filled with demands that the recusancy laws against Catholics be severely enforced. Thus began the conflict between the king and his Parliament, not with the king attempting to rob Parliament of its prescriptive rights and privileges, but with the Commons attempting to rob the king of his!

Buckingham then proceeded to really mess things up through his utter incompetence. Having recognized the insult to the king in the Commons’ vote - and the threat to his own plans for war – he convinced the Lords to reject the bill granting the king tonnage and poundage for a year. The result of this, of course, was that Charles was not granted these customs by Parliament at all! His officers continued to collect them, which they had strong prescriptive authority to do, but this only increased the opposition to the king in the Commons. The Commons then attempted to impeach Buckingham but were prevented from doing so by the king’s dissolving Parliament. This was more or less the pattern for the next two Parliaments as well. The third Parliament was suspended, rather than dissolved, in June of 1628, four months after it had been called, and in the recess Felton’s blade removed Buckingham permanently as a source of contention between Charles and his Parliament. This odious act of “murder most foul” was the most praiseworthy deed that can be attributed to the Puritans.

By this point in time, Buckingham had really fouled things up. Having talked both king and Parliament into war with Spain but failing to obtain for the king the funds necessary to fight the war, Buckingham proceeded to conduct the war by means of highly romantic adventures which he botched badly, such as the failed attempt to capture the Spanish port Cádiz. Then he managed to get England involved in a second war with France. He had promised, in the treaty with France that he had negotiated with Cardinal Richelieu over King Charles marriage to Henrietta Maria, that England would contribute ships to help Richelieu suppress the Huguenots at La Rochelle and the Ile de Ré. That hardly helped to dampen the suspicions of the Calvinists in Parliament that the government was sympathetic to popery, especially when Buckingham tried to carry these promises out. Then Buckingham broke with Richelieu and took English forces to aid the Huguenots! He was of no help to them whatsoever and in fact, they ended up saving him after his force was decimated, but having learned nothing from this embarrassment, he was organizing a larger force to come to their aid when Felton assassinated him.

The death of Buckingham brought harmony to the relationship between Charles and his queen which had previously been strained. (5) It was too late to repair the relationship between the king and Parliament, however. Three Parliaments had approved the wars but refused to vote Charles the money needed to fight the wars, or even the king’s traditional customs and duties, unless Buckingham was removed from office and the king had responded to their arrogance with stubbornness of his own, dissolving the first two Parliaments and proroguing the third. Placed in the position of being in Parliament-approved wars without Parliament-approved funding, the king continued to collect tonnage and poundage without Parliament’s authorization, and resorted to such means as forced loans and the billeting of troops to cover his military expenses.

This sort of thing, if done today, would be unconstitutional. It was not unconstitutional at the time. Parliamentary authority over all taxes was not yet an established part of the constitution and even without Parliamentary approval the king’s collection of tonnage and poundage was backed by prescription and precedent. Nor was this sort of thing unjust. These measures were not oppressive, especially when compared to the kinds of taxes that would later be imposed on people once Parliament had seized most of the king’s powers and authority. The Puritans in Parliament were not being reasonable. They were in favour of war with Spain and France because they wished to pillage and plunder the Catholics but they didn’t want to pay for it.

Justifiable and constitutional as these measures were at the time, they made Parliament furious. When the third Parliament resumed in January 1629 Buckingham was dead but it no longer mattered. Sir John Eliot and his Puritan followers launched an attack upon the king. They prepared three resolutions, two of which were about taxes and one about religion, and forcibly held the Speaker of the House in his chair while they read them out. The first resolution, the religious one, declared the person who tried to “extend or introduce Popery or Arminianism” to be a “capital enemy to this kingdom and commonwealth”. In this case “Popery” did not mean only literal allegiance to the Pope or Roman Catholicism, but also ceremonialism or ritualism. King Charles had just made appointed several Arminians and high churchmen to important ecclesiastical offices. These resolutions were not voted upon and the king dissolved Parliament. This time he did not call it together again for eleven years. At no time in the seventeenth century was Britain governed better than in those eleven years.

No longer under the influence of Buckingham and his romantic military adventurism, Charles quickly negotiated an end to the wars with France and Spain and from then on sought to negotiate a diplomatic end to the Thirty Years War. No other minister ever had the influence in his reign that Buckingham had and to advise him, he called together a competent Privy Council. Among these advisors, the two most important were as excellent as Buckingham had been foolish. One of these was Thomas Wentworth, who had initially been among Charles opponents in Parliament, but who had become a supporter of the king in 1628. Wentworth was appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1632 and was made the Earl of Strafford in 1640. The other minister was William Laud, whom Charles had made Bishop of London and then later Archbishop of Canterbury, and who was also Chancellor of Oxford University. Both men were hated by the Puritans and met with the same fate as Charles.

As Lord Deputy of Ireland, Wentworth was an efficient administrator. He weeded out corrupt and inefficient officials, increased revenues and cut out wasteful spending, turning a large deficit into an even larger surplus. He put down the pirates who had been the terror of the Irish sea and administered justice fairly. Of his justice Derek Wilson wrote “He applied even-handed justice and won few friends in the process”. (6)

William Laud’s theology set him at odds with the Puritans. He rejected the Calvinist understanding of the doctrine of predestination in favour of the Arminian understanding of free will and he was a firm high churchman, believing that the legitimacy of the sacraments in the Church of England were derived from the Apostolic succession of her bishops. He agree with the Puritans on one thing – the Church was badly in need of reform. When he was appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in 1633 at the age of sixty he promptly set out to bring in those reforms. His reforms, however, were not the kind the Puritans had in mind. He desired unity and order in the Church and he saw these things primarily in terms of ritual, ceremony, and decorum. This reeked of Rome to the Puritans, especially when the specific reforms, such as his insistence that altars be placed at the east end of the building and called altars rather than communion tables, brought the Church closer to the practices of Roman Catholicism. Laud was not particularly impressed with the kind of reforms the Puritans sought either. They wished for stricter enforcement of moral behaviour, such as the banning of recreational activities on Sundays. In Laud’s first year as Archbishop he convinced the king to reissue the Book of Sports which his father had passed in 1617. The Book of Sports was a declaration that after Sunday services, people could participate in such “harmless recreation” as archery, dancing, etc. This infuriated the Puritans who saw this as authorizing Sabbath-breaking. Charles ordered that the declaration be read from the pulpit by all clergy. Charles Carlton writes that one clergyman read the proclamation first, then the ten commandments, and told his congregation “You have heard the commandments of God and Man, obey which you please.” (7) However, he also noted earlier in the same paragraph that:

Although some opposed such Sabbath breaking, for most people it was the only day that they had for recreation. Admittedly the church ales could degenerate into drunken brawls, but again they were one of the few releases working folk had from the daily grind. (8)

If you think about what our Lord had to say regarding the Sabbath during His earthly ministry it is not difficult to figure out which side was closer to Him in spirit here. Here’s a hint. It wasn’t the Puritans.

This brings us back to Disraeli’s assertion that King Charles laid down his life for “the cause of the Church and the cause of the poor.” Anthony M. Ludovici made the same observation about Charles’ repeal of the Sunday observation laws that Professor Carlton did. He wrote:

In 1633 Charles I, to the intense annoyance of the Puritans, repealed the Sunday observance laws, which he felt were taking the spirit out of the working people, who had but that day upon which to play and enjoy themselves, and he ordained that, after attending evening prayers, everybody should be allowed to amuse himself in any decent way he might choose. (9)

In the chapter in which Ludovici wrote this he was making the case that King Charles, Archbishop Laud, and the Earl of Strafford had as one of the main goals of their policy, in both theory and practice, the protection of the poor from abuse by the rich. He does in fact make a very strong case for this. He points to the fact that Charles’s taxes, which Parliament made such a big deal over, were actually very light and that “An essential part of the real grievance was that the weight of this taxation fell entirely upon the trading and wealthy classes.” (10) He discusses Charles’ appointment of Commissioners to “inquire into the laws for the relief of the poor” and make sure the officials appointed to uphold these laws were doing their jobs. (11) Then he brings up the commissions Charles appointed to deal with depopulation. This was a problem that had been growing for centuries. In the open-field system of the Middle Ages, each village had a large community field, divided into strips that each year were allotted to the peasants in the village to farm. At the end of the medieval period these began to be converted to private use through a process called enclosure. Often they were converted into uses, like pasture for sheep, which were far less labour-intensive and a result of all this was depopulation – plenty of people lost their homes and livelihoods. This had become a major problem in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the process of enclosure-depopulation was strongly denounced by the Church and opposed by the Houses of Tudor and Stuart. Archbishop Laud in particular championed the traditional rights of the newly dispossessed peasantry and of all the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, Charles was the one who most actively combated this injustice, appointing several different commissions to deal with it in the eleven years he ruled without a Parliament, using his Star Chamber to prosecute offenders. Other measures Ludovici mentions by which Charles sought to defend the poor and the weak include his coming to the assistance of the Essex weavers in 1629, his efforts to keep the price of corn from rising in 1630, his 1633 proclamation “against the intolerable avarice” of those who were overcharging for victuals (which affected the poor most harshly), his legislation against various sorts of fraud, and his efforts to maintain high standards of quality for manufacturers. (12)

Now it needs to made clear that none of this was socialism. It would be socialism if done by a democratically elected assembly today. It was not socialism when done by a divinely ordained feudal king in the seventeenth century. If there is confusion on this point today it is largely due to twentieth century tendency to think about all issues in terms of polarized spectrums, in this case an economic spectrum between the poles of absolute freedom and government control.

When a king passes laws protecting the poor and the weak, he is fulfilling a duty that is inseparable from his office, a duty which has come down to him from God. A democratically elected assembly, however, derives its powers from the people and not from God. When it passes legislation like this it is a vulgar display of the lowest of human vices. At the time the events we have been considering took place, England was in a transition from feudalism to liberal capitalism. Charles, in defending the poor and the weak, was advocating their traditional rights under feudalism, against the forces that were sweeping capitalism in. Socialism is an advanced stage in the development of liberal capitalism.

This is an important fact which is far too often overlooked. Do not be confused by socialism’s anti-capitalist rhetoric. All socialists accept capitalism. As an ideology, socialism is built upon the same foundational concepts as liberal capitalism – the sovereignty of the people, society as a contract between its members, the superiority of reason and science over tradition and revelation, etc. As a system of economic organization, socialism like liberal capitalism, is based upon the concentration of production in large, mechanized, factories based in urban centres. The differences between socialism and capitalism are smaller and less important than what the two have in common, which distinguishes them both from pre-liberal organic, rural, agrarian, feudal societies rooted in a worldview derived from Christianity.

When Charles called Parliament back together in 1640, it was not a humbler, wiser, Parliament, but a much more arrogant Parliament. Two Parliaments were called that year. The first, the Short Parliament, was dissolved after three weeks. The second, the Long Parliament, would not be dissolved until 1660. Headed by John Pym, the Puritan party had more control over Parliament and made demands of a radical and revolutionary nature. They demanded that control of the army and navy, which constitutionally belonged to the king, be turned over to them. They introduced the Root and Branch Bill, in response to a petition they had received from London’s Puritan extremists in December of 1640, demanding the abolition of the episcopal hierarchy of the Church of England, denouncing such things as surplices and copes, standing for the reading of the Gospel, facing the East while praying, and calling the flock to the altar to receive communion, and calling for the severe persecution of Roman Catholics. They demanded a veto over all of the king’s appointments. .

They also went after the king’s ministers. They arrested Wentworth, now the Earl of Strafford. He had raised an army in Ireland and had advised the king in Privy Council to use that army to put down the rebellion by the Covenanters in Scotland. His rival Sir Henry Vane used his words against him, deliberately misinterpreting them as advice to use the army against Parliament. They charged him with treason and began the impeachment process but then they decided to condemn him through a Bill of Attainder instead. The difference between the two was basically this – to impeach him, they would have had to have had a trial before the House of Lords which would follow the procedure of an ordinary criminal court in which evidence would be required and Strafford would be allowed a defence, whereas by Attainder they simply passed a bill declaring him guilty of treason and ordering his execution. Unlike impeachment, however, Attainder required royal assent. They had decided to insist that the king himself sign off on their murder of one of his loyal lieutenants He refused to give his assent, promising Strafford that he would not sign, and telling Parliament that if they dropped the Attainder he would permanently dismiss Strafford from his service. They would not have it and Strafford released him from his promise, pleading with him to sign to save the kingdom. He did and the guilt of it would torment him for the rest of his life.

The execution of Strafford took place in May of 1641. Later that year they presented the king with the Grant Remonstrance, a document which had it not been written in the seventeenth century, would read like a Jack T. Chick comic book. It asserted that in order to effect a Roman Catholic takeover of Britain the Jesuits had infiltrated the House of Bishops, the Privy Council, and the king’s officers and ministers in general, and that in order to save the kingdom for the true faith from Popish influence it was necessary that the king abolish the powers of the bishops and give Parliament control over all his appointments. Laud was not mentioned by name but it was obvious they were singling him out as Jesuit-in-chief and three weeks after they presented the Great Remonstrance to the king, they impeached Laud and ordered him imprisoned in the Tower of London.

It was now absolutely clear that there could be no reasoning with the Puritans. Several members of Parliament who had earlier been supportive of Parliamentary opposition to the king now formed a Royalist party in Parliament. (13) Lucius Cary, the 2nd Viscount Falkland led the party along with Sir John Colepeper and Edward Hyde, who would become the Earl of Clarendon in the Restoration. The formation of the Royalist party in Parliament was too late, however, to affect a reconciliation between the king and his Parliament and prevent the conflict that was about to start. On January 4th, 1642, King Charles went personally to St. Stephen’s Chapel in the Palace of Westminster where the House of Commons was assembled to arrest John Pym and four other Puritan leaders for treason, of which, unlike Strafford whom they had executed on the same charge, they were actually guilty. The attempt failed due to their having escaped but it was ill-advised to begin with. It violated the prescriptive privileges of Parliament, and while the Puritans were currently engaged in trying to subvert the very constitution from which those prescriptive privileges were derived, they were able to use this to stir up widespread anger against the king in London. The royal family fled London and the English Civil War began.

In Men at Arms, the first volume of his Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh’s protagonist, Guy Crouchback, explains the motive for his returning home to England and seeking to enlist to fight in World War II. The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had formed an alliance, which meant that Britain was fighting against “the Modern Age at arms”, and he believed his place was in that conflict. Throughout the trilogy he gradually becomes disillusioned as he experiences how modern the British army itself had become and as Britain makes its dishonourable alliance with Stalin. While World War II did not live up to Crouchback’s expectations there are other conflicts which could accurately be described as fights against “The Moden Age at arms”. The internecine war between the American states from 1861-1865 was one of them. The English Civil War was another. Unfortunately in both cases the Modern Age won.

King Charles’s supporters were the Cavaliers – knights of chivalry, honourably fighting out of loyalty to their king. He had the support of the older, longer established, noble houses, of the poorer, rural areas, and of Oxford and its University. In terms of territory, the areas loyal to the king were the northern and western parts of the country. The south-east, where the big urban centres were located, the hub of industry and trade, was the base from which the Puritans operated. Their supporters were religious fanatics, tradesmen, and the nouveau-riche, especially newer landlords who had enriched themselves through enclosure and depopulation. It was the traditional and feudal on the one side versus the modern on the other side.

Unfortunately, the modern came with practical advantages. The Puritans had more money and their territory was united in one large area, whereas the Royalists’ territory was divided into two large areas. Moreover England’s ports were located in their territory which is one reason why the navy, furbished by the ship money Charles had collected, sided with the Puritans. In 1644 and 1645, Parliament passed the Self-Denying Ordinances which re-organized its forces into the New Model Army – a modern, professional, army, that was placed under the general command of Sir Thomas Fairfax. Under Fairfax, Sir Philip Skippon commanded the infantry and Oliver Cromwell commanded the cavalry. The New Model Army had all the cold, utilitarian, efficiency of a modern army and in the Battle of Naseby in June 1645, they defeated the Royalist army commanded by the king’s nephew Prince Rupert of the Rhine. King Charles and the remnants of his army retreated to Oxford, then in 1646 he went north and surrendered to the Scots who turned him over to the English Parliament in 1647. He was imprisoned at Holmby House in Northamptonshire, then at Hampton Court. While he was in captivity, his opponents began to fight among themselves and Charles used this division to his advantage as he negotiated with the various sides. He escaped from Hampton Court and went to the Isle of Wight where he placed himself in the custody of the unsympathetic Col. Robert Hammond, who promptly locked him up in Carisbrooke Castle. In 1648, his supporters in England and an invading Scottish army sought his restoration but the Puritan army quickly defeated them.

At this point the army took matters into its own hands. Following the defeat of the Royalists at the Battle of Preston the Long Parliament entered into negotiations with King Charles, hoping that he would sign a treaty limiting the royal prerogative and handing power over to Parliament in return for restoration to the throne. The army would have none of that. On Fairfax’s orders, Colonel Pride purged the Parliament, removing from it the majority that was in favour of signing the treaty with the king. The remainder, known as the Rump Parliament, rubberstamped the army’s decision that King Charles should be tried and executed for High Treason.

On January 4th, 1689 they authorized the establishment of the kangaroo court that assembled at Westminster Hall on January 20th to try the king. The court was presided over by John Bradshaw, a boorish, ill-mannered, homunculus, who showed up at the proceedings late and when he found that he had no answer to the arguments the king put forth in his defence, kept rudely interrupting him. The king spoke patiently and eloquently, pointing out that the court that presumed to try him as a “Tyrant, Traitor and Murderer, and a public and implacable Enemy to the Commonwealth of England”, had no legitimate authority to do so. The court was conducted in defiance of both the laws of God and of the constitution of England, having been called together by a “House of Commons” the majority of whom had been forcibly prevented from sitting, without the House of Lords or Royal assent, in the name of “the people” the majority of whose opinions they had not bothered to ask. There was, of course, no possible answer to this and, once the sentence of death by beheading was passed on January 27th, although he was initially asked if he wished to speak further on his behalf, Bradshaw prevented him from doing so.

On January 30th, 1646, he was taken to the scaffold, where he was allowed to address his people before his execution. In his final speech he neither backed down from the position he had been upholding nor falsely confessed to the crimes he had been wrongly accused and convicted of, but forgave his enemies and declared that although the sentence upon him was unjust in earthly terms, under God it was justly imposed because he had allowed a previous unjust execution to take place – that of Strafford. The crowd that had gathered to watch the execution was in sympathy with him and groaned out in sorrow when the executioner removed his head. (14)

The abolition of the Roman kings and establishment of the Roman Republic created a power vacuum, that eventually was filled by the rise of the Caesars. When the Bourbon monarchy was overthrown in France in the late eighteenth century it produced a tyrannical and murderous republican government and paved the way for the rise of Napoleon. The overthrow of the Romanov, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties in the twentieth century prepared the way for the creation of the Soviet Union and the tyrannies of Lenin, Stalin and Hitler. The murder of Charles Stuart was no different. The Puritans, who had accused him of tyranny, overturned the English constitution, abolished the office of king and the House of Lords, and eventually established Oliver Cromwell as dictator. Upon his death, England restored the constitution as best as they could, and placed Charles II on his father’s throne. Some of the damage could not be repaired but Britain was more fortunate than the other examples mentioned.

“Rightly”, Disraeli wrote, “was King Charles surnamed the Martyr.” When the Church of England canonized him a saint in 1660, they did so on the basis of his martyrdom, that he refused to save his life by betraying his people or his Church. His queen, Henrietta Maria, whom the Puritans hated and believed was conspiring to bring the king and England back under the authority of the Pope, had pleaded with him during the Civil War to save his life and his crown by accepting Presbyterianism. He wrote to her saying:

For the difference between me and the rebels concerning the Church is not a matter of form or ceremony, which are alterable according to occasion, but so real that if I should give way as is desired, here would be no Church, and no human probability ever to be recovered: so that, besides the obligation of mine oath, I know nothing to be an higher point of conscience. (15)

Today, five hundred years after the Reformation, most Protestant Christians, having been seeped in the ideas that religion is a private matter, that Christianity is a “personal relationship” between the individual and Christ, and doctrines and practices can be divided into the categories of basics and non-basics, the latter of which are completely unimportant and not worth dying for and into which category they would most certainly place church government, will find it very difficult to understand, let alone sympathize, with Charles’s position. If they try to make sense of it at all, they are likely to see the doctrine of Apostolic succession as something concocted by bishops and priests in order to justify their privileges, power, and position within the Church.

This is a shame because the real issue is far more important than that. One of the fundamental differences between modern liberal thought and pre-modern thought is the understanding of the nature of human society. Is a society a voluntary association of individuals formed by mutual contract? Or is a society a living organism, whose members are united in a whole in a way similar to the cells in a body, with a lifespan that exceeds any one generation but includes all past and future generations? Modern liberalism is based upon the contractual view. Pre-modern Western thought, however, saw societies and communities as organic. In the Bible, St. Paul puts forward an organic view of the Church in several of his epistles in which he expands upon the concept of the Church as the Body of Christ. Oddly, it is mostly in Protestantism, otherwise the most Pauline of the various Christian traditions, that the organic concept has been abandoned, at least with regards to the organized Church, for the liberal contractual concept in ecclesiology.

The Apostolic succession of bishops is important, not because it supports the powers and privileges of prelates, but because it contributes to an organic view of the Church. Christ founded His Church, ordained His Apostles to govern it, who ordained bishops (Gk episcopoi, administrators) to help them govern it once it spread far and wide, who once the Apostles died out continued to ordain other bishops. In saying that if this were eliminated “here would be no Church” Charles was saying that organic connection to the Church founded by Christ was necessary for a Church to be a Church.

His taking this position did not mean that he wished to bring the Church of England back under the authority of the Pope. This accusation was always ridiculous, whether directed against him or against Laud. Both men were Protestants. Both men were high Anglican churchmen, whose belief that the Church of England already had a valid Apostolic succession would not have been consistent with a drive to bring that Church back under the authority of Rome. When, in the nineteenth century, John Henry Newman crossed over to the Roman Catholic Church, he did so because he no longer believed in the validity of the Church of England’s Apostolic succession.

Like his defence of the rights of the Crown, divine and constitutional, against Parliament’s hypocritical attempts to enhance their own privileges and powers at the expense of those of the king, and of feudal rights against the encroachment of industrial capitalism, Charles’ defence of the Apostolic episcopacy of the Church of England, is best seen as part of an overall resistance to modernity, in its infancy in his own day, but which would soon grow and stretch forth its hand to try and strangle all that was left of the good, the true, and the beautiful from Western civilization, and all but succeed in doing so.

For that reason, the Church of England made no mistake in honouring this holy martyr with the title saint.


(1) T. S. Eliot, To Criticize the Critic and Other Writings (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965), p. 65. The quotation is from “Can ‘Education’ be Defined”, the first of four lectures on the subject of “The Aims of Education” which Eliot gave at the University of Chicago in 1950.

(2) Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, or the Two Nations, Vol. 1, (London and New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1904), p. 331.

(3) Richard M. Weaver said that the Divine Right of Kings was “widely misunderstood”. Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 76. He said this in the context of noting that the doctrine was often grouped with the concept of vocation – that “work is a divine ordinance” and that both ideas were now out of fashion. He goes on to confirm that the ideas are associated and that they are different variations on the answer to a single question “What is his real authority to act?” when asked of rulers and of workers. He extends the concept of “the divine right of kings” to all legitimate governments and quotes an unlikely authority – Puritan Governor of Massachusetts John Winthrop to explain the idea. Classic expositions of the concept of the “divine rights of kings” – which is, of course, entirely Scriptural and the plain teaching of both Jesus and St. Paul – include James I’s The True Law of Free Monarchies or The Reciprocal and Mutual Duty Betwixt a Free King and his Natural Subjects (1598), Basilikon Doron (1599) and Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha or the Natural Power of Kings (1680).

(4) Charles Carlton, Charles I: The Personal Monarch (London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p. 69.

5) D. R. Watson, The Life and Times of Charles I, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1972), p. 65-66. “The Queen complained that Buckingham came higher in her husband’s affections and that he was poisoning the King’s mind against her.” Derek Wilson, The King and the Gentleman: Charles Stuart and Oliver Cromwell 1599-1649, (London: Hutchinson, 1999), pp. 166-167.

(6) Wilson, op. cit., p. 298.

(7) Carlton, op. cit., p. 164. In the endnote to this anecdote Carlton writes “This story was associated with so many incidents that it may be worth telling more than it is worth believing.”

(8) Ibid.

(9) Anthony M. Ludovici, A Defence of Aristocracy: A Textbook For Tories (London: Constable, 1915, 1933 ), pp. 129-130.

(10) Ibid, p. 121.

(11) Ibid, p. 129.

(12) Ibid, pp. 135-138.

(13) Following the Restoration, the Royalist Party was succeeded by the Tory Party, organized in 1678 to resist further attempts by the Whigs (liberals) to mess with the Crown and the Church. It was in turn re-organized into the Conservative Party in 1834.

(14) The biographical and historical details in this essay have been largely drawn from the sources listed in footnotes four and five.

(15) Charles Stuart to Henry Marietta Stuart, January 11, 1646, quoted in D. R. Watson, op. cit., p. 147.