Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today!

We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all.

He had some thoughts on how such divided Christians could face their division, noted by our friend Darryl Hart. Machen’s thoughts appear in a discussion of pernicious laws against Christian schooling — which he called the clearest “attack upon tolerance in America” — being proposed in the mid-twenties:

Against such tyranny, I do cherish some hope that Jews and Christians, Roman Catholics and Protestants, if they are lovers of liberty, may present a united front. I am for my part an inveterate propagandist; but the same right of propaganda which I desire for myself I want to see also in the possession of others.

What absurdities are uttered in the name of a pseudo-Americanism today! People object to the Roman Catholics, for example, because they engage in “propaganda.” But why should they not engage in propaganda? And how should we have any respect for them if, holding the view which they hold — that outside the Roman church there is no salvation — they did not engage in propaganda first, last, and all the time? Clearly they have a right to do so, and clearly we have a right to do the same. . . .

Does this mean, then, that we must eternally bite and devour one another, that acrimonious debate must never for a moment be allowed to cease? . . . . There is a common solution of the problem which we think ought to be taken to heart. It is the solution provided by family life.

In countless families, there is a Christian parent who with untold agony of soul has seen the barrier of religious difference set up between himself or herself and a beloved child. Salvation, it is believed with all the heart, comes only through Christ, and the child, it is believed, unless it has really trusted in Christ, is lost. These, I tell you, are the real tragedies of life. And how trifling, in comparison, is the experience of bereavement of the like!

But what do these sorrowing parents do? Do they make themselves uselessly a nuissance to their child? In countless cases they do not; in countless cases there is hardly a mention of the subject of religion; in countless cases there is nothing but prayer, and an agony of soul bravely covered by helpfulness and cheer.

And there’s this from a weblog dedicated to Machen, about Machen’s time working with the YMCA in the trenches in WWI:

Spiritually, he had to make do too — reading his English Bible rather than in Greek, which brought home some things with a freshness; worshipping with Roman Catholics. Of one sermon he says “It was far, far better than what we got from the Protestant liberals”.

In conversation afterwards, he could not agree with the priest on the mass but responded to a complaint that the phrase “descended into hell” was missing from versions issued to American soldiers “I could assure him that I disapproved as much as he did of the mutilation of the creed”.

I believe we Catholics could do much better at defending our faith. Would you recommend books on Basic Christian apologetics (CS Lewis type of apologetics) and Catholic apologetics.

I will be sending him some suggestions but I would be grateful for recommendations from you. In three categories: the two he lists and a third offering Protestant apologetics, which may include works arguing directly against Catholicism.

Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed.

As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president’s answers when he’s pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not.

I’ve been wondering when, in the course of the president’s second term, the tide would turn against him. Lame ducks are vulnerable even to their friends, who have their own reasons for being critical — for reporters, for example, being critical makes finding the story that might make the front page or the nightly news much easier. You have a choice between loyalty to an ideological comrade who’s losing power day by day and the chance to advance your career which has a good many yeas to run, and it’s bye-bye comrade.

The IRS scandal brought this on rather sooner than I would have expected. Obama as per usual throws up in his hands in shock and horror and fusses and claims he’ll do something about it. It’s an Inspector Renault in the casino moment, and the president has had so many of these that even his supporters must begin to doubt how shocked, shocked! he actually is. As Noonan writes:

The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He’s shocked, it’s unacceptable, he’ll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you.

But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department.

A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town.

Those of us who remember Watergate (I was in junior high) will remember all the talk about “the arrogance of power” and the Actonion warnings about what happens to men who have it. The effect of Nixon’s personality and character on those who worked for him was endlessly analyzed and the argument made that the kind of man he was determined the kind of men who worked for him and what they did. People felt that a Nixon would naturally, if not inevitably, have an Erlichman and a Liddy under him.

And these were, though at the time partisan, good lessons. I don’t think I’ve yet heard anyone on the left use those words, or see in Obama’s character an encouragement to the arrogance of power in those who staff his administration, though the lessons are obviously as true now as they were then. And truer, if anything, the administration’s sense of entitlement and righteousness being something that weakens one’s resistance to temptations.

The temptations are built into the nature of political power. They’re the ordinary temptations fallen men experience, whether in sixth grade student government or the White House. (Or, we should be honest, in an editorial office.) Though I know what Noonan means by “no ordinary scandal,” and agree with her, the odds seem to be good that the current scandal is really quite ordinary —  extraordinary in scale, of course, but boringly ordinary in nature.

Wouldn’t find a cat doing this.

And is it a good thing, evidence that we had a heated debate on a new civil right and the civil rightsy side won? I don’t think so. I don’t think we can even call this a ‘consensus’, since that would imply the voluntaristic coming together of different elements in concord. It’s better described as conformism, the slow but sure sacrifice of critical thinking and dissenting opinion under pressure to accept that which has been defined as a good by the upper echelons of society: gay marriage. Indeed, the gay-marriage campaign provides a case study in conformism, a searing insight into how soft authoritarianism and peer pressure are applied in the modern age to sideline and eventually do away with any view considered overly judgmental, outdated, discriminatory, ‘phobic’, or otherwise beyond the pale.

This “extraordinary consensus” or “conformity” was not achieved by gay rights activists changing public opinion, he argues, but by elites led by judges in particular.  (Judges, he notes, are described by Harvard Law School professor Michael Klarman as a “distinctive subculture,” and a more liberal one, of the cultural elites.) O’Neill then reviews the mechanisms by which this conformism was achieved, including the effective use of social media as explained by Scientific American.

But, one thinks, all this elite pressure wouldn’t have worked even ten years ago, and certainly not twenty or thirty years ago. How could what then seemed a settled conviction about sexuality (or prejudice, if you wish) disappear so fast?

O’Neill has an answer, which seems to me correct. The non-elites proved susceptible to such pressures for a reason,  he notes. “The fragility of society’s attachment to traditional marriage itself, to the virtue of commitment, has also been key to the formulation of the gay-marriage consensus. Indeed, it is the rubble upon which the gay-marriage edifice is built.” He continues:

If lawyers, politicians and our other assorted ‘betters’ have successfully kicked down the door of traditional marriage, it’s because the door was already hanging off its hinges, following years of cultural neglect. It is society’s reluctance to defend traditional views of commitment, and its relativistic refusal more broadly to discriminate between different lifestyle choices, that has fuelled the peculiar non-judgmental tyranny of the gay-marriage campaign, which judges harshly those who dare to judge how people live.

Through a combination of the weakness of belief in traditional marriage and the insidiousness of the campaign for gay marriage, we have ended up with something that reflects brilliantly John Stuart Mill’s description of how critical thinking can cave into the despotism of conformism, so that ‘peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes, until by dint of not following their own nature, these [followers of conformism] have no nature to follow’.

the necessity and the importance of the presence of security forces to ensure order and stability, and for organizing the celebration of the Holy Fire at the Church of the Resurrection. Yet, it is not acceptable that under pretext of security and order, our clergy and people are indiscriminately and brutally beaten, and prevented from entering their churches, monasteries and convents. . . .

We deplore that every year, the police measures are becoming tougher, and we expect that these accidents will not be repeated and the police should be more sensitive and respectful if they seek to protect and serve.

The Jerusalem Post reports that Deputy Foreign Minister Ze’ev Elkin formally apologized to the leaders of the Coptic Orthodox Church and that the police are investigating the incident “in coordination” with the Church. For more on this, see our earlier post.

The difference in reaction times is genetic, and the scientist who led the study draws from that the conclusion that

Our declining intelligence is most likely down to a “reverse” in the process of natural selection, he explained. The most intelligent people now have fewer children on average than in previous decades, while there are higher survival rates among people with less favourable genes.

“The pressures of modern life, a nine-to-five modern lifestyle, have created all these pressures against very smart people having break-even numbers of children,” he said.

In other words: smart people should have more children. Which is a lesson I’d endorse, though with the concern that many people who would say so would also say that less smart people (people with “less favourable genes”) should have fewer children simply because they’re not as smart as other people.

For Pope Francis, “the devil is not a myth, but a real person.” In one of his morning homilies, reports Sandro Magister, Francis said:

“With his death and resurrection, Jesus has ransomed us from the power of the world, from the power of the devil, from the power of the prince of this world. The origin of the hatred is this: we are saved and that prince of the world, who does not want us to be saved, hates us and gives rise to the persecution that from the earliest times of Jesus continues until today.

“One must react to the devil — the pope says — as did Jesus, who “replied with the word of God. With the prince of this world one cannot dialogue. Dialogue is necessary among us, it is necessary for peace, it is an attitude that we must have among ourselves in order to hear each other, to understand each other. And it must always be maintained. Dialogue is born from charity, from love. But with that prince one cannot dialogue; one can only respond with the word of God that defends us.”

This is not something theologians and pastors, at least those in the developed world, tend to say, outside very conservative Protestant circles. Many readers will, I suspect,  share with me the instinctive wish that Francis wouldn’t talk like that. Everything we’ve learned outside church has trained us to feel that talk of a personal devil is the point at which religion crosses into fruitloopery, like snake-handling. We believe in the supernatural, but do not feel entirely comfortable with talk of certain elements of the invisible world traditionally believed.

But belief in the devil and his legions is part of the Christian revelation, and an important part at that. As C. S. Lewis noted in his sermon Learning in War-Time:

I spoke just now of fiddling while Rome burns. But to a Christian the true tragedy of Nero must be not that he fiddles while the city was on fire but that he fiddles on the brink of hell. You must forgive me for the crude monosyllable. I know that many wiser and better Christians than I in these days do not like to mention heaven and hell even in a pulpit. I know, too, that nearly all the references to this subject in the New Testament come from a single source. But then that source is Our Lord Himself. People will tell you it is St. Paul, but that is untrue. These overwhelming doctrines are dominical. They are not really removable from the teaching of Christ or of His Church. If we do not believe them, our presence in this church is great tomfoolery. If we do, we must sometime overcome our spiritual prudery and mention them.

And as the Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches:

391 Behind the disobedient choice of our first parents lurks a seductive voice, opposed to God, which makes them fall into death out of envy. Scripture and the Church’s Tradition see in this being a fallen angel, called “Satan” or the “devil”. The Church teaches that Satan was at first a good angel, made by God: “The devil and the other demons were indeed created naturally good by God, but they became evil by their own doing.”

392 Scripture speaks of a sin of these angels. This “fall” consists in the free choice of these created spirits, who radically and irrevocably rejected God and his reign. We find a reflection of that rebellion in the tempter’s words to our first parents: “You will be like God.” The devil “has sinned from the beginning”; he is “a liar and the father of lies.”

If this is true, it is something we should know not just for our eternal destinations but for happiness in this world. Something you can’t see, like the HIV virus, wants the worst for you, and as would one exposed to the virus, you should take prophylactic measures. What you don’t know can hurt you.

Sandro Magister’s article includes a helpful article from a recent issue of L’Obbservatore Romano on How the Scripture Speaks of the Devil. Here is a useful short summary of Catholic teaching.

Update: Lewis was talking specifically about Hell, a friend points out. I was thinking of his insistence that “crude monosyllable” — like “Hell” but also “Devil” or “Satan” — are biblical and not something we can avoid if we want to speak the same language as Scripture (and the Church), and that the gospels speaks rather clearly of Satan and the devils in a way equally impossible to blow off as a kind of optional extra not relevant to the whole message.  I should have made this clear.