A TALE OF TWO CITIES

MECCA 1718

Book the First—Recalled to Life I. The Period It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way— in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only. There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes, that things in general were settled for ever.

1083px-View_from_Stpeters 1024px-Final_circulation_of_the_Kaaba-Mecca

Christian and Muslim Playing Chess

In 711, troops mostly formed by Moors from northern Africa led the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. The Iberian peninsula then came to be known in Classical Arabic as al-Andalus, which at its peak included most of Septimania and modern-day Spain and Portugal. In 827, the Moors occupied Mazara on Sicily, developing it as a port.[9] They eventually went on to consolidate the rest of the island. Differences in religion and culture led to a centuries-long conflict with the Christian kingdoms of Europe, which tried to reclaim control of Muslim areas; this conflict was referred to as the Reconquista. In 1224 the Muslims were expelled from Sicily to the settlement of Lucera, which was destroyed by European Christians in 1300. The fall of Granada in 1492 marked the end of Muslim rule in Spain, although a Muslim minority persisted until their expulsion in 1609.[10]

The Church's Islam Problem - Crisis Magazine

The Church's Islam Problem - Crisis Magazine: After a series of terror attacks in France, including one that left three people dead at a Catholic Church in Nice, Vatican Cardinal Robert Sarah said that the West must wake up to the threat of Islamism. “Islamism,” His Eminence said, “is a monstrous fanaticism which must be fought with force and determination.” But you …

France attack: Three stabbed to death in 'Islamist terrorist attack' October 29 2020

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Appealing for Syria, Cardinal Zenari, Apostolic Nunzio, Repeats: 'The Hardest Way to Be Killed Is In Silence' - ZENIT - English

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Appealing for Syria, Cardinal Zenari, Apostolic Nunzio, Repeats: 'The Hardest Way to Be Killed Is In Silence' - ZENIT - English: While Calling for Hope, Warns of Heightened Risks of Fundamentalism Which Could Put Us All at Risk

Antifa and the Muslim Brotherhood: Birds of a Feather - Crisis Magazine

Antifa and the Muslim Brotherhood: Birds of a Feather - Crisis Magazine: “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” So wrote Vladimir Lenin. The Communist Revolution which he engineered did seem to pack many decades of change into a relatively short time. The old tsarist order was quickly overthrown, and, almost overnight, Russia was transformed from a Christian country to an …

 

Another 9/11 is Unlikely — and Why You Shouldn’t Relax

BY WILLIAM KILPATRICK | SEP 20, 2020

The fact that there has been no 9/11-type attack in the U.S. for 19 years proves… what?  That Islamic terrorist groups are not capable of mounting another such attack?  That America’s security network is on much higher alert than in the innocent days before 9/11?

Maybe so.  But another, quite likely possibility is that Islamic radicals see no need for another large-scale attack.  Why bother with spectacular, violent acts of jihad when incremental, under-the-radar, cultural jihad will serve the same purpose?

Cultural jihad, which is also known as stealth jihad, is a long-term campaign to influence and even co-opt key social institutions such as schools, courts, media, political parties, and churches.  In what follows, I will use the terms “cultural jihad” and “stealth jihad” interchangeably.

Many Americans think that, as long as there are no major terror attacks, then all is well.  But what we need to worry about most are the day-to-day stealth attacks on our culture.  These “stealth” operations don’t even need to be particularly stealthy.  Americans tend to put the best possible interpretation on the activities of the multicultural “other.”  Thus, when in the days immediately following 9/11, various Islamic advocacy groups managed to convince President Bush that Islam means “peace,” and that terrorists were only a tiny minority who had “hijacked a great religion,” those who noticed assumed that the advocates were only being helpful. 

The 9/11 attacks ended on the same day they began, but stealth jihad influence operations didn’t stop for a minute.  The suit-and-tie jihadists were back at work on September 12, September 13, and September 14, and have been busily pursuing their subversive aims ever since.  That’s approximately 7,300 days of subversive activity — and most of it has gone unnoticed.

We have, of course, heard of the more publicized incidences of stealth jihad such as the infiltration of Fort Hood Army Base by Major Nidal Hasan, and the similar penetration of Pensacola Naval Air Station by a lieutenant in the Saudi Air Force.  But how many remember, or have ever heard of, the purge of training materials used by the FBI at the behest of Muslim activist groups in 2011-2012?  The aim was to eliminate any material that was offensive to Islam.  Rather than be thought “Islamophobic,” the FBI, along with more than a dozen other security agencies, meekly complied with Muslim demands, and replaced effective programs with a see-no-Islam policy.  Likewise, how many know about the Islamic influence operation on American universities?  According to a Clarion Project report, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have poured billions of dollars into dozens of major American universities in recent years.  The result?  Many of America’s academic experts on Islam have developed a financial interest in pedaling the politically correct view of Islam.   Meanwhile, students learn a whitewashed version of Islamic beliefs and history not unlike the Disneyfied version of communism they also acquire in college.

In short, radical Islamists quickly realized after 9/11 that spectacular attacks were counterproductive.  They had the effect of waking people up, when, as it turned out, it was more desirable to put them to sleep.

This is a lesson that leftists in America are just now learning.  The violence in the streets is waking up voters to the dangers of leftism and communism.  Many on the left have decided it is better instead to revert to the leftist version of cultural jihad, and double down on it.  Like Islamists, the left has for decades been engaging in a highly successful, Gramscian-type, long march through the institutions — schools, media, entertainment, political parties, even corporations.

In the current cultural revolution, the left may have shown its hand too soon — its violent hand, that is.  So, in the days ahead we can expect more emphasis to be placed on cultural intimidation — indoctrination in the classroom, self-criticism sessions at the office, re-education programs on race and privilege in government agencies, and fake narratives from the media.

The initial reaction to 9/11 was, indeed, one of heightened alertness and sudden awareness of the possibility that we were faced with a clash of civilizations.  The Islamists had played their hand too soon, and they quickly realized that it was not a good idea to wake a sleeping giant.

Thus, they resumed their cultural jihad.  It proved to be a highly successful program.  After 9/11, one would have expected that Islamic beliefs would have come under increased scrutiny.  Initially, that was the case.  But suspicion quickly gave way to affirmation as jihadists in business suits began a campaign to emphasize the kinder, gentler side of Islam.  They were particularly successful in converting American educators to the idea that 9/11 had nothing to do with Islam.  Before long, schools were presenting Islam as a victim of hatred, discrimination, Western imperialism, and Islamophobia.  And not long after, any critique of Islam became strictly off-limits — even among members of our security establishment.

What’s next?  That’s difficult to say.  But one thing is certain.  As a result of the current leftist cultural revolution, cultural jihadists will have observed that Americans are far more submissive than anyone had previously supposed.  Many Americans have been schooled to be ashamed of their culture and their heritage.  They don’t see anything of value in it worth defending.  In short, they appear ready to submit to any powerful ideology that seems to offer an alternative.

Exactly how Islamists will take advantage of our lack of cultural confidence and our willingness to submit to intimidation is hard to say, but it’s almost certain that they will try.  After all, the word “Islam” means “submission.”

Don’t discount another 9/11 type attack.  But the more likely move is a ramping up of the daily efforts to hollow out our cultural confidence and sap our will to resist.

This article originally appeared in the September 15, 2020 edition of The American Thinker

Another 9/11 is Unlikely -- and That's not Good News The fact that there has been no 9/11-type attack in the U.S. for 19 years proves… what? That Islamic terrorist ...

.

Photo credit: Pixabay

 

Leftists, Islamists, and America’s Weakened Resolve

BY WILLIAM KILPATRICK | SEP 13, 2020

Right now, the greater threat appears to come from the left, but don’t discount Islam’s 1400-year record of cultural and geographical conquest.

Until three months ago, an attempted leftist takeover of American cities seemed a remote possibility. It seemed even less likely that, as the lawlessness spread, prominent voices in our society would join the radicals in calls to defund and even abolish the police. And who would have imagined that, like well-trained seals, giant corporations and wealthy sports teams would jump through whatever hoops the radicals held before them?

No one, it seems, was prepared for what happened. Yet it did happen, and there are many indications that the situation could grow worse. The end result might well be the establishment of a permanent revolutionary government. A future that seemed highly improbable yesterday is now materializing before our eyes.

Meanwhile, for more than a decade, a number of scholars, journalists, and historians have been warning of another, seemingly improbable, future event—an Islamic takeover of our society. If your immediate reaction is to dismiss the notion as preposterous—as something that can’t possibly happen here, consider this: how prepared were you for the leftist insurrection that is currently engulfing our cities? How prepared were you for the capitulation of many social and commercial institutions to the cancel culture? Did you foresee that a Red Guard-type cultural revolution would sweep through our society, resulting in toppled statues and forced oaths of allegiance to the new order?

For that matter, how prepared were you for a once-in-a-century pandemic that resulted in a national lock-down which, in turn, brought unemployment to depression-era levels?

Can’t happen here? A number of disastrous events that were not on anyone’s radar just did happen here.

Don’t be too quick to dismiss the possibility that more unexpected and unpleasant surprises are on the way from another quarter. After all, the raison d’être of Islam is the spread of Islam. In case you haven’t consulted the Koran recently, the long-term goal of Islam is to subjugate the whole world to Allah. If that sounds like the megalomaniac delusion of a villain in an Ian Fleming thriller, consider that Islam has made far more progress in the world-takeover department than SMERSH or SPECTRE could ever hope for. And, indeed, in almost every corner of the globe, Islam keeps extending its reach—in Nigeria, the Central African Republic, the Philippines, Lebanon, India, and, of course, in Europe where appeasement of Muslim demands has become the order of the day.

Many Americans, however, would insist that we are immune to Islamization. We’re different from all those other places. One of our first flags featured a rattlesnake and a “Don’t Tread on Me” warning. We cherish our liberty and will fight to defend it. Or so we tell ourselves. On the other hand, America has not proven itself immune to leftist propaganda and intimidation. Leftists of various stripes have been treading all over our cities with impunity in recent months. And when suburbanites post “Black Lives Matter” signs on their lawns in the hope that the vandals will tread on someone else’s lawn, it signals that something has gone out of the national character. If we can’t resist the threat from the left, why suppose that we will be able to resist Islamic intimidation and propaganda—especially when Islamists already enjoy the support of the “progressive” left and their many institutional backers?

Perhaps the essential factor in our failure to stand up to the leftist mobs is a lack of cultural confidence. After decades of educational and media indoctrination, many Americans have come to believe that America really is a racist and discriminatory society without any redeeming qualities. They believe, in short, that America is not worth defending.

So, when statues are torn down, churches vandalized, and America’s founders maligned, a good many of our miseducated citizenry conclude that we had it coming. When communist-style purges are conducted against those who won’t assent to leftist doctrine, the woke among us don’t recognize it as such. They haven’t been taught much about communism or about purges. But they have been taught about the sins of America. In fact, that’s pretty much all they know. And so, the purges being conducted by the cancel culture seem perfectly justified to those who are only shallowly rooted in their own culture.

Likewise, the woke don’t know much about Islam except that it’s a religion of peace, a victim of Western imperialism, and a protected diversity. From the woke point of view, only an “Islamophobe” would question the intentions of Islamic activists.

The best indication that Islamization can happen here is that it’s already happening in large parts of Europe. A number of observers are predicting that several European countries will fall under Islamic control within two decades. This slow-motion takeover is partly due to Islamic immigration and high Muslim birthrates, but also to the fact that Europe’s aging native population is losing the will to resist. That’s understandable. It’s difficult to resist when your hands are occupied with maneuvering your walker.

But the will to resist is not simply a factor of age. It’s also bound up with one’s sense of meaning—something that is usually found in religious faith and in family life. Unfortunately, Europe is a post-Christian, post-family society. The fastest growing segment of the population is Muslim and the vast majority of newly built houses of worship are mosques. It’s beginning to look like the future of Europe will be an Islamic future.

How about the U.S? The situation is different isn’t it? Well, yes. The population is younger than Europe’s. Although family ties are frayed, people still believe in having families. And, although church attendance has declined, Christianity is still a powerful force in many people’s lives.

So, a sudden turn to Islam would seem unlikely. Yet, a sudden turn to Marxism also seemed unlikely. What needs to be understood is that the hard-left lurch we are now experiencing didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the result of long planning and gradual infiltration. For decades, leftists have been tunneling under the foundations of American Society—school, family, church, and free enterprise. It should come as no surprise that we would eventually suffer a collapse of some of our key social institutions.

Likewise, Islamic activism is not a recent development in America. Cultural (or stealth) jihadists have been active since the mid-sixties, carefully laying the groundwork for the eventual triumph of Islamic values over American values. A Muslim Brotherhood memorandum which was dated May 22, 1991, but not discovered by the FBI until years later, envisioned a “grand jihad:”

The Ikhwan [Brotherhood] must understood that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within…so that…God’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Under the Obama administration, the grand jihad flourished. Hillary Clinton’s State Department worked closely with the Organization of the Islamic Cooperation to censor criticism of Islam. And, with American support, the Muslim Brotherhood quickly came to power in Egypt. Meanwhile, Islamic activist organizations came up with their own version of “defund the police”—one that could more accurately be described as “defang the security establishment.” In 2011, a coalition of these groups demanded a purge of training materials used by the FBI, Homeland Security, the Pentagon and more than a dozen other security agencies. The aim was to eliminate any material that was offensive to Islam, and the result was that these agencies were forbidden to draw any connection between Islamic terror and Islamic doctrine. One consequence was that numerous jihad terror attacks which might have been prevented were not.

In some places, the police were also targeted. In New York City, one coalition of Muslim groups actually did manage to abolish one police unit—the highly effective division that was in charge of surveilling the Muslim community for signs of radicalization.

As with the left, another main target of the cultural jihadists was the universities. Since 2012, according to a Clarion Project study, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other Arab states have poured billions of dollars into dozens of major universities with the result that American students are graduating with both pro-left and pro-Islam sentiments.

There’s not enough space here to go into the various alliances between leftists and Islamists, but let’s consider one important, but little-known example. During the lead-up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, leftists and Islamists worked together to overthrow the Shah. Many in the West don’t recall that the Iranian Revolution was initially a secular/leftist/progressive revolution which was then hijacked by a relatively small group of fundamentalist Muslims led by Ayatollah Khomeini.

After decades of social reform under the two shahs, Iran had become largely secularized and Westernized. Nevertheless, Iranian utopians could still conceive of a more democratic and progressive government than the one provided by the Shah. What most couldn’t conceive of was a return to the despotic and oppressive rule of the ayatollahs and imams. But that’s what they got.

Complacent in the belief that fundamentalist Islam could never make a comeback, the progressives made a bargain with the Devil—and suffered the consequences.

There’s a lesson in this bit of not-so-ancient history for our own uncertain times. In light of all that’s happened in the last seven months, we can’t afford to be sure of anything. And we certainly can’t afford to be complacent about Islam.

Right now, the greater threat appears to come from the left, but don’t discount Islam’s 1400-year record of cultural and geographical conquest. Islamic activists are laying low for the time being, observing how the leftist revolution will play out. By now, they have undoubtedly noted that America’s will to resist is much weaker than anyone had previously imagined.

This article originally appeared in the September 6, 2020 edition of Catholic World Report.

Pictured above: Karl Marx Ensemble Monument, Chemnitz, Germany

Photo credit: Pixabay

William Kilpatrick’s new book, What Catholics Need to Know About Islam, is now available from sophia institute.com/Islam.

What Catholics Need to Know About Islam Sophia Institute Press is a publisher of Catholic books by Catholic saints and the great enduring figures of the...

 

What Catholics Need to Know About Islam

BY WILLIAM KILPATRICK | SEP 6, 2020

(An excerpt from my new book)

Nothing facilitates jihad like ignorance of Islam. And since there is so much ignorance, jihad has been spreading rapidly. But we don’t seem to notice. We hear scattered reports about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran. We know or should know about the daily knife and vehicle attacks in Europe. Yet we are somehow sure that such things can’t happen in America. But it is precisely our naïve nonchalance that practically guarantees that it will. Meanwhile, Church leaders do nothing to dispel the ignorance. While the Vatican deludes itself with talk of common ground, Islam continues to devour ground—both geographical and cultural.

Of course, it’s not just Catholics who aren’t facing up to unpleasant truths about Islam’s spread. After thirty-six thousand deadly jihad attacks since 2001, complacency is still the order of the day. This complacency is due in large part to the fact that we underestimate the extent of jihad. That’s because we never hear about the vast majority of jihad attacks, and also because we tend to quickly forget about the ones we have heard. The threat is real, but our memory is short.

But maybe you’re still not convinced that the threat is as extensive as I’ve suggested. So, to make the point, let me test your memory about some large-scale Islamic terror attacks that you might have forgotten. For instance, do you remember the first attack on the World Trade Center? For many of you, that’s an easy question. But younger readers may be scratching their heads: “What first attack? There was only one, wasn’t there?” Many members of the “woke” generation hadn’t yet been born in 1993. That’s when Islamic terrorists detonated a massive truck bomb in the parking garage underneath the North Tower. It blew a hundred-foot-wide hole through four sublevels of the building, sent smoke to the 93rd floor, and resulted in six deaths and more than a thousand injuries (many from smoke inhalation).

Now, let’s make the questions a little more difficult. Do you remember the bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid? It happened in 2004 and resulted in 191 deaths and 1,800 injuries. It was big news at the time, but today’s fast-spinning news cycle tends to drive old events quickly out of memory to make room for new ones.

How about the massacre in Beslan, Russia? Do you recall that? In 2004, thirty Muslim terrorists took over a large elementary school in Beslan. More than 330 people—many of them children—were left dead before the army finally dispatched the terrorists. At the time, it seemed like one of those heart-wrenching stories that one never forgets. But it’s a good bet that, outside Russia, many have forgotten it.

Mumbai? The attack in Mumbai by a team of Muslim terrorists was a four-day siege that left 164 dead and 300 wounded. One of the main targets of the attack was the iconic Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, large sections of which could be seen on TV news engulfed in smoke and flames. If the attack on Mumbai is still fresh in your mind, perhaps it was recalled to your memory by the release of the film Hotel Mumbai in February 2018.

The Bataclan Theatre attack? The London tube and bus bombings? The Brussels Airport attack? All of these were large-scale attacks with massive casualties, yet you probably have to strain your memory to bring up even a dim recollection.

Now, for the sixty-four-thousand-dinar question. Do you remember the coup attempt on the government of Trinidad? No? Well, neither did I. I came across the story only recently, and then, with a little help from Wikipedia, it slowly came back to me. In 1990, 115 members of a radical Muslim organization took over the Parliament and the island’s only television station. After six days, they finally surrendered to the army, but not before 24 people had been killed.

I bring up the Trinidad coup attempt because it demonstrates just how widespread jihad is and how long it has been going on. At this point, I’m tempted to launch into a discussion of the several jihad attacks on beach resorts and tourist attractions. But I don’t want to spoil your next vacation, and besides, violent jihad is not even the main problem.

The main focus of this book is not on armed jihad, but on another kind of jihad that is even more threatening. I call it “cultural jihad,” but it’s also referred to as “stealth jihad.” This kind of jihad is more dangerous because it’s more widespread and because most of us are hardly aware of its existence.

Cultural jihad is a long-term campaign to spread Islamic law and culture by influencing key cultural institutions such as media, political parties, schools, and churches. Take the influence operation that Arab states have been conducting on American universities. Since 2012, tiny Qatar has donated $376 million to Carnegie Mellon University, $351 million to Georgetown, $340 million to Northwestern University, $275 million to Texas A&M, $41 million to Virginia Commonwealth University, and lesser amounts to two dozen other major universities. Saudi Arabia has donated similar sums to more than sixty universities.

Why would Islamic donors give large sums of money to already wealthy American colleges? What do they hope to get out of it? Does the emir of Qatar hope that Harvard will name a building after him? Are Saudi princes hoping to get their sons into Princeton despite low test scores? Or are they, perhaps, trying to bribe the Mideast Studies Departments, the Islamic Studies Departments, and the History Departments to present Islam in a favorable light?

Of course, the politically correct answer to the last question is: “Bribes? That’s ridiculous. Who ever heard of an American university accepting bribes?”

The reality is that there are hundreds of such influence operations reaching into all our major social institutions. Some of them aren’t even very stealthy, because they don’t have to be. Western citizens have learned to keep their heads down and not notice things. If you notice and make a fuss, that means you’re an “Islamophobe.” And that could mean big trouble.

Does cultural jihad stand a chance of transforming the culture? Well, here’s an analogy. Ten years ago, it didn’t seem as if the LGBT movement had a chance of enforcing its nuttier notions. If six years ago, you were told that libraries all over the country would someday be sponsoring drag-queen story hours for kids, you wouldn’t have believed it. Likewise, you wouldn’t have believed it if you were told that doctors and professors would be fired for failing to address bearded men as “Miss.”

But now we’re all believers. All of a sudden, the drag queens are calling the shots. This is fairly amazing when you consider that the LGBT slice of the population is only about 2 percent, and the drag queen and bearded lassies segments are smaller still.

Muslims in America are less than 2 percent of the population, but they are backed by a worldwide Muslim population of 1.7 billion. They are also backed by the same powerful forces that back drag-queen story hours and boys in girls’ locker rooms—namely media, academia, courts, big business, big tech, and prominent politicians. In addition, like the LGBT lobby in America, Muslim activists in the United States use the same successful tactics. At first, they say that they’re simply civil rights groups whose only desire is for equal rights. They assure you that all they want is a place at the table. Then the demands ramp up, and if you don’t go along with them, you are—depending on which group you’re offending—either a homophobe or an “Islamophobe.”

It almost seems as though the Islamists and the leftists have been—what’s the word?—“colluding.” In fact, a tacit alliance has long existed between Islamists and leftists in the West. And both groups have been highly successful in their efforts to hollow out the culture from within.

Many people are unaware of this alliance. And here we come back to the knowledge-gap problem. Curiosity, they say, killed the cat, but it is lack of curiosity about Islam that is killing the West. One can’t entirely fault the average citizen for his incuriosity, however, because when it comes to Islam, the press gives him little to be curious about.

Take the plot to blow up the railroad bridge over the Niagara River gorge as a New York to Toronto passenger train crossed over it. What’s that? You never heard of the plot to blow up the bridge over the Niagara River? That’s strange. If successful, the plot would have resulted in hundreds of deaths. Luckily, it was foiled by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI. But don’t feel bad if you didn’t know. Outside of New York, the plot got very little news coverage. Apparently, the media decided it wasn’t important for you to know.

According to the old saying, “What you don’t know won’t hurt you.” But what you don’t know about Islam can hurt you very much. The Niagara River gorge is hundreds of feet deep, but not nearly as deep as our ignorance of the faith founded by Muhammad.

This excerpt from my new book originally appeared in the September 1, 2020 edition of Crisis.

Pictured above: Grand Mosque, Abu Dhabi

Photo credit: Pixabay

What Catholics Need to Know About Islam - Crisis Magazine

What Catholics Need to Know About Islam - Crisis Magazine: Nothing facilitates jihad like ignorance of Islam. And since there is so much ignorance, jihad has been spreading rapidly. But we don’t seem to notice. We hear scattered reports about the persecution of Christians in Nigeria, Egypt, Pakistan, and Iran. We know or should know about the daily knife and vehicle attacks in Europe. Yet …

Will Facebook Kill the Church? - Crisis Magazine

Will Facebook Kill the Church? - Crisis Magazine: Professor Richard Beck offers a provocative and well-written look at a truth that hardly anyone else is willing to state. In his piece “How Facebook Killed the Church,” he argues that our new connectivity through Facebook and cell phones, and the broader digital world of Twitter and Skype, is hammering away at the foundational social …

That is why you dial your phone using “Arabic numerals.” And that is just the tip of a big iceberg of ideas and values shared between Islam and the West.

That is why you dial your phone using “Arabic numerals.” And that is just the tip of a big iceberg of ideas and values shared between Islam and the West.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/04/opinion/arabic-numerals.html

Hagia Sophia: Turkey turns iconic Istanbul museum into mosque July 10 2020

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-53366307

The Siege of Christendom:threatens all our civilization again.

                                              Byzantine_and_Sassanid_Empires_in_600_CE

Byzantiumby650AD.svg

                                 

The Siege of Christendom: Threatens all our civilization again.

The first five centuries, extending from the Incarnation to the conversion of Clovis and the establishment of Catholic Gaul, the end of the five centuries during which all our ancestry turned from Paganism to Catholicism and during which the Empire was baptized, were centuries in which we suffered great damage: disorder, barbarism threatening our race, the fall of the arts, of great verse and of high unified administration, the worsening of roads, much loss

It is a period of five centuries-the 6th,7th,8th,9th and 10th-which have been commonly called the “The Dark Ages,” but which may more properly be called  “The Siege of Christendom.” 

It was the period during which the Graeco-Roman Empire, already transformed by Catholicism, fell into peril of destruction at the hands of exterior enemies. 

It was assaulted from the north, from the east, and from the southeast in two separate fashions. Hordes of wholly pagan barbarians, some issuing from Scandinavia, many Mongols, many Slavs, fiercely thrust at the boundaries of Christendom with the hope of looting it as their prey and therefore ruining it. 

These between them formed the eastern attack, coming from the districts we call today Sweden and Norway and Denmark, Poland and the Russian plains, Hungary and the Danube valley.

The struggle against these enemies of the Christian name and culture, who so nearly overwhelmed us, was at last successful. 

The siege was raised, we carried the influence of civilization outward among those who had been our savage opponents, and we ended by taming them until they were incorporated into a new and expanded Christian civilization. 

That was the work of the Christian Church in the West, the Church under the direct authority of the Western Patriarch at Rome (who is also universal primate) and of the Latin liturgy.


What happened on the southeast was quite different. There, that is, against the Greek-speaking part of the Empire, directly ruled from Constantinople, the attack took the strange form of a sudden enthusiastic movement, which was both religious and military. 

It took the form of a swarm of light desert cavalry riding out from the sands of Arabia and swooping down on Greek-speaking and Greek-administered civilizations, Syria (including Palestine) and Mesopotamia, Egypt, and then, from Egypt, following up all along the southern shores of the Mediterranean between the sea and the Sahara. 

It reached the Atlantic itself in Morocco, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and passed northward, overran Spain and even crossed the Pyrenees. 

To these mountains it was beaten back after its first northern extreme had been reached in the middle of France. 

This attack from the southeast was the Mohammedan attack, not pagan as was the other to the north, not savage, but from the beginning, incorporating in its conquest all the elements of civilization, developing a high literature of its own, and turning at last from a heresy, which it was in its beginnings, to what was virtually a new religion and a new type of Society-Islam.

In the south, however, the siege of Christendom by its enemies was successful. It was never raised.

It was undertaken at first by very small numbers, but under the inspiration of a religious zeal –Mohammedanism-and with the exceptional opportunity they had, the attackers took over that part of Christendom, the Greek part, which they attacked. 

They took over its culture, its arts, its buildings, its general social structure, its land survey (on which the taxes were based) and all the rest of it. 

But the attackers imposed their new heresy which gradually became a new religion and which held power over government and society wherever the attack broke our eastern siege-line and occupied Christian territory. 

The result was a complete transformation of society which rapidly grew into a violent contrast between the Orient and Europe. 

Mohammedanism planted itself firmly not only throughout Syria but all along North Africa and even into Spain, and overflowed vigorously into Asia eastward.

The opportunity for the attack on this sector was exceptional. The high Greek civilization centralized in Constantinople and its wealthy Imperial Court, defended by highly trained professional army, possessing great revenues as well, might have seemed superficially far better able to resists assaults than was Western Europe, with its conditions already half-barbaric through the long
material decline, with its lack of regular armies and its divisions into half-independent local groups. 

But as a fact the blow delivered against the Greeks, the Christendom of the southeast, cracked the shell and had more immediate and more profound consequences than the mere raids of the east and north.

The opportunities given for the attack from the southeast were fourfold. 

First, debt was universal (as it is with us today); secondly, taxes were very heavy; thirdly, a large proportion of the population were slaves (as it is with us today); fourthly, both law and theology, that is, both social practice and religious rules had become more complex than the masses could follow.

A new reforming enthusiasm invading the Empire could take advantage of all these four weaknesses: it could promise the indebted farmer, the indebted municipal authority, the wiping out of their debts; it could promise the heavily burdened small taxpayer relief from his burden; it could promise freedom to the slave and it could promise a simple-a far too simple-new set of rules for Society and a new set of practices in religion. 

It was this forth appeal, the appeal to simplification, especially to simplification of religion and morals, which had the greatest force. 

It worked in Syria and Egypt at that moment just as it worked nine centuries later in the West during the Reformation.

This intense enthusiasm for reform arose almost wholly from the personal driving-power of one man, an Arab camel driver called Mohammed. 

Like all the Arabs around him in that desert region outside the jurisdiction of the Christian Empire under Constantinople, he was born a pagan. But having wandered far afield he was deeply stirred by the religious systems, Christian and Jewish, which he came across in the civilized world. 

Certain main tenets appealed to him intensely; he summed them up in a body of doctrine which remained his own. 

He became passionately attached to the idea of the personnel omnipotent God, the creator of all things, to His justice and His mercy, to the corresponding double fate of mankind, Heaven or Hell, to the reality of the world of good, as well as of evil, spirits, to the resurrection and immortality of human beings. 

All this group of simple fundamental Catholic doctrine he not only accepted but was permeated by. He was struck with awe at the contemplation of Christ and regarded Our Lord as the very first of the moral teachers and renovators of the spiritual life. And he paid deep veneration to Our Lady.

But a priesthood (which to his mind was a useless social complexity), the whole sacramental system which went with a priesthood, and that central essential pillar of Christendom, the Mass, he rejected altogether. 

He also rejected Baptism, retaining or accepting circumcision not only as a Jewish rite but as common among his own people. He allowed a relaxed sexual morality, concubinage and a plurality of legitimate wives, as also very easy divorce.

We must presume that this powerful zealot was sincere, that he felt vouchsafed within him a divine revelation and a mission to spread it by his burning enthusiasm. 

He felt himself to be in the line of the greater prophets, the last and the greatest of them all. There may have been an element of the charlatan and deceiver about him, as his enemies’ believed in part. 

But for the main, for his right to his mission and his claim to be the supreme prophet of God we must believe that he was sincere. At any rate the band of men whom he convinced and gathered around  him established a new heresy (for it was essentially a Christian heresy at first, though arising just outside the boundaries of Christendom) {and} fiercely propagated it by arms-a spirit which strongly appealed to the Arab temper. 

The seed took vigorous root, and shortly after Mohammed’s death the band of mounted warriors, burning to spread the intense doctrine he had framed for them, burst through the confines of civilization where the desert meets the cultivated land east of Jordan.

Their success was amazing. 

They took Damascus, which is the key of all the Near East, and in the valley of the Yarmuk they defeated the regular Christian Byzantine Army sent against them, though it vastly exceeded them in numbers. 

They swept over Syria and Mesopotamia, organizing their new power everywhere, offering freedom to the slaves and the debtors, and relief to the taxpayer wherever these would accept the religion of Mohammed. 

And the simplicity of the religion powerfully aided their effort. 

Men desiring freedom from thralldom and from debt and from the weight of the imposts, joined them everywhere in great numbers. 

There arose a governing Mohammedan nucleus which alone had armed power and which vastly exceeded in number the original cavalcade that had set out from the Arabian sands.

The great majority of the population remained, of course, still attached more or less directly to their Catholic traditions or those of their local heresies.; their practices of liturgy were tolerated by the new masters, but they no longer had any political power and all the armament was in the hands of those who were now their superiors.

The system of Mohammedan government over great regions of Christian culture spread with amazing rapidity; it swamped Egypt, using henceforth the revenues of the great wealth in the Delta and the Valley of the Nile. 

It passed over and dominated the Greek-speaking , Punic-speaking and Latin-speaking cities of the North African shore lying between the Mediterranean and the desert. 

The triumphant invasion did not cease even when it reached the Atlantic; it crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, it overran the Spanish peninsula, it crossed the Pyrenees and attempted to do to Western Christendom what it had done to Eastern.

The great wave broke when its crest had reached the center of Gaul.

In a vast battle fought halfway between Tours and Poitiers the Christians under the leadership of one of the wealthiest and greatest of the Gallo-Roman families mixed with German blood-the family from which Charlemagne was to come-  threw back the invasion to the Pyrenees. 

But beyond the Pyrenees this strange new Arabian thing , though a small minority in numbers, was supreme over government and arms.

The pace of that expansion was so astonishing as to be still claimed by the Mohammedans as miraculous and as proof of their prophet’s divine mission. 

The original battle of Yarmuk, when the first Byzantine army had been astonished into sudden defeat at the hands of quite unexpected foes, took place in 634. 

The battle between Tours and Poitiers in the heart of France was fought in 732. Not a hundred years, little more than a long lifetime, had sufficed for this prodigious expansion.

The siege of Christendom on this side , to the southeast and the south, had indeed succeeded; save Spain itself, it was never raised. 

On the contrary, the pressure against Christendom in the east was to remain continuous and at last to threaten all our civilization again. 

The Mohammedan was at the gates of Vienna less than a hundred years before the Declaration of Independence. Had he taken Vienna, he would have reached the Rhine.

From The Foundation of Christendom by H. Belloc,

Europe's Largest Muslim Population by Country

                               The spread of global Islam

                                                                     Islam in Europe

                          Muslims /Europe_neighbors/Family

   

Sharia Law: Tearing the West in Two

How did Islam arise?: by Hilarie Belloc

How did Islam arise?: by Hilarie Belloc

It was not, as our popular historical textbooks would have it, a "new religion." It was a direct derivative from the Catholic Church. It was essentially, in its origin, a heresy: like Arianism or Albigensians.

When the man who produced it (and it is more the creation of one man than any other false religion we know) was young, the whole of the world which he knew, the world speaking Greek in the Eastern half and Latin in the Western (the only civilized world with which he and his people had come in contact) was Catholic. It was still, though in process of transformation, the Christian Roman Empire, stretching from the English Channel to the borders of his own desert.

The Arabs of whom he came and among whom he lived were Pagan; but such higher religious influence as could touch them, and as they came in contact with through commerce and raiding, was Catholic—with a certain admixture of Jewish communities.

Catholicism had thus distinctly affected these few Pagans living upon the fringes of the Empire.

Now what Mahomet did was this. He took over the principal doctrines of the Catholic Church—one personal God, Creator of all things; the immortality of the soul; an eternity of misery or blessedness—and no small part of Christian morals as well. All that was the atmosphere of the only civilization which had influence upon him or his. But at the same time he attempted an extreme simplification.

Many another heresiarch has done this, throwing overboard such and such too profound doctrines, and appealing to the less intelligent by getting rid of mysteries through a crude denial of them. But Mahomet simplified much more than did, say, Pelagius or even Arius. He turned Our Lord into a mere prophet, though the greatest of the prophets; Our Lady (whom he greatly revered, and whom his followers still revere), he turned into no more than the mother of so great a prophet; he cut out the Eucharist altogether, and what was most difficult to follow in the matter of the Resurrection. He abolished all idea of priesthood: most important of all, he declared for social equality among all those who should be "true believers" after his fashion .

With the energy of his personality behind that highly simplified, burning enthusiasm, he first inflamed his own few desert folk, and they in turn proceeded to impose their new enthusiasm very rapidly over vast areas of what had been until then a Catholic civilization; and their chief allies in this sweeping revolution were politically the doctrine of equality, and spiritually the doctrine of simplicity. Everybody troubled by the mysteries of Catholicism tended to join them; so did every slave or debtor who was oppressed by the complexity of a higher civilization.

The new enthusiasm charged under arms over about half of the Catholic world. There was a moment after it had started out on its conquest when it looked as though it was going to transform and degrade all our Christian culture. But our civilization was saved at last, though half the Mediterranean was lost.

For centuries the struggle between Islam and the Catholic Church continued. It had varying fortunes, but for something like a thousand years the issue still remained doubtful. It was not till nearly the year 1700 (the great conquests of Islam having begun long before 700) that Christian culture seemed—for a time—to be definitely the master.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Mahommedan world fell under a kind of palsy. It could not catch up with our rapidly advancing physical science. Its shipping and armament and all means of communication and administration went backwards while ours advanced. At last, by the end of the nineteenth century, more than nine-tenths of the Mahommedan population of the world, from India and the Pacific to the Atlantic, had fallen under the Government of nominally Christian nations, especially of England and France.

On this account our generation came to think of Islam as something naturally subject to ourselves. We no longer regarded it as a rival to our own culture, we thought of its religion as a sort of fossilized thing about which we need not trouble.

That was almost certainly a mistake. We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our Faith it will rise. For after this subjugation of the Islamic culture by the nominally Christian had already been achieved, the political conquerors of that culture began to notice two disquieting features about it. The first was that its spiritual foundation proved immovable; the second that its area of occupation did not recede, but on the contrary slowly expanded.

Islam would not look at any Christian missionary effort. The so-called Christian Governments, in contact with it, it spiritually despised. The ardent and sincere Christian missionaries were received usually with courtesy, sometimes with fierce attack, but were never allowed to affect Islam. I think it true to say that Islam is the only spiritual force on earth which Catholicism has found an impregnable fortress. Its votaries are the one religious body conversions from which are insignificant.

This granite permanence is a most striking thing, and worthy of serious consideration by all those who meditate upon the spiritual, and, consequently, the social, future of the world.

And what is true of the spiritual side of Islam is true of the geographical. Mahommedan rulers have had to give up Christian provinces formerly under their control: especially in the Balkans. But the area of Mahommedan practice has not shrunk. All that wide belt from the islands of the Pacific to Morocco, and from Central Asia to the Sahara desert—and south of it—not only remains intact but slightly expands. Islam is appreciably spreading its influence further and further into tropical Africa.

Now that state of affairs creates a very important subject of study for those who interest themselves in the future of religious influence upon mankind. The political control of Islam by Europe cannot continue indefinitely: it is already shaken. Meanwhile the spiritual independence of Islam (upon which everything depends) is as strong as, or stronger than, ever.

What affinities or support does this threat of Islam promise to the new enemies of Catholic tradition?

It will sound even more fantastic to suggest that Islam should have effect here than to suggest that Asiatic Paganism should. Even those who are directly in contact with the great Mahommedan civilization and who are impressed, as all such must be by its strength and apparently invincible resistance to conversion, do not yet conceive of its having any direct effect upon Christendom. There are a few indeed who have envisaged something of the kind. But what they had to say was said before the Great War, was confined to individuals either isolated or eccentric, and produced no lasting impression upon either the French or the English: the only two European countries closely connected, as governing powers, with the Mahommedan. To the New World the problem is quite unfamiliar. It touches Mahommedanism nowhere save very slightly in the Philippines.

Nevertheless I will maintain that this very powerful, distorted simplification of Catholic doctrine (for that is what Mahommedanism is) may be of high effect in the near future upon Christendom; and that, acting as a competitive religion, it is not to be despised.

No considerable number of conversions to Mahommedanism from Christendom is probable. I do not say that such a movement would not be possible, for anything is possible in the near future, seeing the welter into which Christian civilization has fallen. But I think it improbable, and even highly improbable, because Mahommedanism advances in herd or mob fashion. It does not proceed, as the Catholic religion does, by individual conversions, but by colonization and group movement.

But there are other effects which a great anti-Catholic force and the culture based upon it can have upon anti-Catholic forces within our own boundaries.

In the first place it can act by example. To every man attempting to defend the old Christian culture by prophesying disaster if its main tenets be abandoned, Mahommedanism can be presented as a practical answer.

"You say that monogamy is necessary to happy human life, and that the practice of polygamy, or of divorce (which is but a modified form of polygamy) is fatal to the State? You are proved wrong by the example of Mahommedanism."

Or again "You say that without priests and without sacraments and without all the apparatus of your religion, down to the use of visible images, religion may not survive? Islam is there to give you the lie. Its religion is intense, its spiritual life permanent. Yet it has constantly repudiated all these things. It is violently anti-sacramental; it has no priesthood; it wages fierce war on all symbols in the use of worship."

This example may, in the near future, be of great effect. Remember that our Christian civilization is in peril of complete breakdown. An enemy would say that it was living upon its past; and certainly those who steadfastly hold its ancient Catholic doctrines stand today on guard as it were, in a state of siege; they are a minority both in power and in numbers. Upon such a state of affairs a steadfast, permanent, convinced, simple philosophy and rule of life, intensely adhered to, and close at hand, may, now that the various sections of the world are so much interpenetrating one and the other, be of effect.

The effect may ultimately be enhanced in the near future by a political change.

We must remember that the subjection of the Mahommedan—a purely political subjection—was accomplished by nothing more subtle or enduring than a superiority in weapons and mechanical invention. We must further remember that this superiority dates from a very short time ago.

Old people with whom I have myself spoken as a child could remember the time when the Algerian pirates were seen in the Mediterranean and were still in danger along its southern shores. In my own youth the decaying power of Islam (for it was still decaying) in the Near East was a strong menace to the peace of Europe. Those old people of whom I speak had grandparents in whose times Islam was still able to menace the West. The Turks besieged Vienna and nearly took it, less than a century before the American Declaration of Independence. Islam was then our superior, especially in military art. There is no reason why its recent inferiority in mechanical construction, whether military or civilian, should continue indefinitely. Even a slight accession of material power would make the further control of Islam by an alien culture difficult. A little more and there will cease that which our time has taken for granted, the physical domination of Islam by the disintegrated Christendom we know.

That the New Arrival called Neo-Paganism will increase seems assured. That it will find support, positive from the older Paganism, negative from Islam as a fellow opponent of Catholicism, is possible or probable—though the modes of such support are not apparent today. But will it long remain as the Main Opposition when it shall have come to maturity? Or will it give way to some New Religion, with definite tenets and an organization of its own? Is there any appearance as yet of such a development? That is what we may next examine, and we must begin by looking at one or two typical bodies of the sort already in existence in order to decide whether they threaten to grow, or point to what might succeed them.

Outside the Catholic Church, we say, what was once Christendom is rapidly becoming Pagan: Pagan after a new fashion, but still Pagan. It is falling into the mood that man is sufficient to himself, and all the consequences of that mood will follow under a general color of despair.

But will this mood, after a first trial, be supplanted by a new religion sufficiently universal, organized and strong to challenge the Catholic Church? At present there is no sign of such a thing. None is present among the New Arrivals. But may not some such force soon arise?

It is very probable. It is not certain.

It is probable, because man can with difficulty persist in mere ideas or abstractions. He can with difficulty live on such thin food. He needs the meat of doctrine defined, of a moral code also defined—and with instances. He needs the institutions of a ritual and of all the external framework of worship. Moreover, man corporate demands answers to the great questions which face him: the problems of his own origin, nature and destiny. Man as an individual can decide them to be insoluble and lead his life—not easily—under the burden of that decision. But man in society does not repose in such negations. Therefore is the production of a new positive religion (with a special character of its own, a ritual, a doctrine) probable.

But it is not certain, for we know that, as a fact, great societies have long persisted content with a social scheme in which conventions take the place of doctrine and in which no defined philosophy clothed with external ritual and supported by organization is universal or even common. And when we consider the present situation we do not discover anything (as yet) from which, as from a seed, this new religion could spring.

It would seem, to begin with, that there will be no resurrection of the Protestant sects.

Not so long ago these were actual religions, and in particular Calvinism, with its fierce logic, iron conviction and completeness of structure, all informed with the French character of its creator. More loosely defined, but, still, organized and individual, heretical or schismatical bodies existed side by side with Calvinism. One could discover in each of these an ethic of its own, and, for all the Protestant ones combined, a fairly defined Protestant ethic or tone of mind. Meanwhile the Greek Church nourished an antagonism rather political than doctrinal and was also a powerful adverse force. But today these forces seem to have passed beyond the possibility of resurrection. Even the political strength of the Greek Church has been put out of action permanently by the effects of the Great War and revolution, with a gang of international adventurers replacing the old power of the Czardom and presiding over the ruin they have made.

I do not mean to deny that the strong evangelical spirit of Protestantism, and particularly of Calvinism, does not survive and is not an opponent; but when one is speaking of its resurrection as a religion for the future one must consider doctrine; and its doctrine has so thoroughly dissolved in the last fifty years that its re-establishment is hardly conceivable.

It is debatable, as I have said, whether this change is one for the worse or the better: on that point we may delay for a moment.

In one sense the power to hold any transcendental doctrine shows the soul to be still awake and therefore capable of achieving true transcendental doctrine, while those who lose the sense of the supernatural will be more difficult of approach.

On the other hand, with the loss of doctrine has gone the loss of support and framework of what opposed us. For instance, a Calvinist of the old school, with his passionately held dogma of salvation by faith, had for the ornament and ritual of the Catholic Church a correspondingly fierce hatred. His son today feels for such things indifference at the best or contempt at the worst; sometimes even admiration of adventitious beauty in Catholic rite and image.

At any rate whether this great change, the decay of the old Protestant bodies, be good or evil, it is an undoubted historical fact of our day. In Britain, as in Germany and the United States, the old catechisms, and what were in their odd way quasi creeds, have disappeared and we shall surely not hear of them again.

Where else may the seed of a New Religion, which shall grow to be the future arch-enemy of the Catholic Church, be sought?

We are surrounded by many novel experiments in worship and doctrine, but in none of them, not even in the Spiritualist, which would seem the strongest in structure, does there appear a vitality sufficient to produce any universal growth.

We find no such vitality in what may be called the "experiments in subjectivism."

Their name is legion. Half-a-dozen have cropped up within the later part of my own lifetime, and no doubt another dozen or more will crop up within the same length of time in the immediate future. It was only the other day that I came across the Sect of Deep-Breathers. In a sense the petty experiments thus based on what is called "subjectivism" are always with us, because almost any statement of religious experience through the individual, and that experience treated as a full authority without reference to the Church or any other form of authority, is subjectivism. Every revivalist meeting is an example of subjectivism. So is every book claiming to discover the truth through personal emotion.

But the subjective sects of this sort are swarming today with an especial vigor that merits attention if we are seeking for the possible signs of a new religion. At least, they are swarming in the English-speaking world.

There is no space to discuss the origins of these things; it must be sufficient to mention them. All ultimately derive from the protest against the authority of the Church at the Reformation. Since the authority of the Church was denied, some other authority had to be accepted. The parallel authority of Holy Scripture was put forward. Then came the obvious difficulty, that, since there was no external authoritative Church, there was no one to tell you what Holy Scripture meant, and you were thrown back on the interpretation which each individual might make of any passage in the Bible, or its general sense. For instance (to take the leading example) the individual had to decide for himself what was meant by the words of Consecration. But the modern extension of the thing has gone far beyond such comparatively orthodox limits as trusting to the authority of Holy Scripture, even under private interpretation. It has taken the form of basing religion upon individual feelings. Men and women say: "This is true, because it is true to me. I have felt this, and therefore I know it to be true."

Of these subjective sects the most curious, though not the most powerful at the present moment, is the strange system called Christian Science. No doubt tomorrow another will succeed it, and after that yet another; but today it is Christian Science which stands out most prominently as the type of a subjective sect. Its votaries, of course, will tell us of much that it includes besides its most striking tenet; but that most striking tenet is sufficient to characterize it. The faithful of the sect are asked to regard the individual mental attitude towards evil, and especially physical evil, as a purely subjective phenomenon. Persuade yourself that it is not there, and it is not there. Hence powers of healing and all the rest of it.

Now these counter-religions, opponents to and, in their little way, rivals of the Catholic Church, have two characteristics apparently contradictory but not really so. One is the permanence of the phenomenon, the other is the ephemeral quality of individual instances. They are always cropping up—especially today—but they are also perpetually disappearing after a short life.

I would like to concentrate upon the second characteristic, to show why I do not regard any one of these counter-religions of the subjective sort as a serious menace to Catholicism.

The sectarian of these vagaries is often intense and always sincere. Based as her (sometimes his) mood is upon personal enthusiasm and personal spiritual experiences, it brooks no contradiction. But it does not last, because it makes no appeal to that fundamental necessity of the human reason for external proof. I may be told that it does so in the particular case of Christian Science which appeals to actual cures. But there is not sufficient volume and persistence of such cures. Moreover, the claim made is at issue with the common sense of mankind.

It is here that the various forms of subjective religion show themselves so much weaker than Spiritualism; for Spiritualism, as we shall see, bases itself on controllable positive proof. Amid a mass of fraud there is a certain residue of ascertainable evidence; and though much of that evidence may be shaken there is a remainder which cannot be denied. Spiritualism appeals to something which the human race has always demanded, to wit, external evidence verifiable by a number of independent means. Your purely subjective religion does not appeal to such evidence. It appeals to intensity of enthusiasm, and to little more. Hence its lack of substance, its probable lack of endurance.

Here it may be objected: "If you say that this or that sect, based on such mere emotions and wholly subjective in character, cannot form the seed of an organized Universal Religion; what about the Catholic Church, which Herself arose from such a beginning of enthusiasm and illusion?"

The parallel is wholly false.

Nothing is commoner than for those who are ill-acquainted with the early history of the Catholic Church and of the society in which it arose, to explain the origin of Catholicism in these terms. They put it forward as a subjective religion, confirmed by some marvelous cures which were real and a host of imaginary events which men only accepted because they were in an abnormal state of mind.

But has Catholicism really been like this in its origins it would never have survived. It survived because it appealed also to the general sense of mankind; because it fitted in with what mankind knew of itself and its needs, and of what it lacked to satisfy such needs; also because it confirmed itself every day in the lives of those subjected to it; because, of the wonders put forward, the greatest of all—the Resurrection—was reluctantly witnessed to by opponents; but most of all because it maintained unity. The Catholic Church was from Her origin a thing, not a theory. She was a society informing the individual, and not a mass of individuals forming a society. From Her very beginning She tracked down heresy and expelled it. She is a kingdom. Subjective religion is a private whim. Though it must continue an unceasing form of error so long as men refuse authority and are strongly subject to religious emotion, it will never build up a rival church. As a general tendency, especially while it still inherits the general ethic of its Protestant origins three hundred years old, it is an influence hostile to Catholicism; but its various products have not the stuff of permanence in them. They have not in them a sufficient correspondence with reality to create any one formidable opponent. Spiritualism has such correspondence with real (objective) phenomena.