Episode #3 – Originally Recorded October 8, 1981

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Books:

The Second Coming of Hitler (J. M. Snider)
The Unkindest Cut (James Axtrell & William C. Sturtevant)
The Tyranny of the Experts (Jethro Koller Lieberman)
Pornography: A Christian Critique (J. H. Court)
The Death of — Innocence (Sam Janus)
Gay is Not Good (Frank M. Du Mas)
Robespierre (Otto Scott)
Ordeal in Cambodia (Vek Huong Taing)
The Argument of the Book of Job Unfolded (William H. Green)

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Transcript of Episode:

Speaker 1: The Reconstructionist Radio Podcast Network presents The Easy Chair with R. J. Rushdoony.

Speaker 2: The Easy Chair with R. J. Rushdoony is brought to you by the Chalcedon Foundation and the GCS Apprenticeship Program. For more information, visit chalcedon.edu and gcsapprenticeship.com.

R. J. Rushdoony: This is R. J. Rushdoony again with our Easy Chair talk number three. This is October 8, 1981. Before going on to other matters, I want to talk very briefly about the economy. One of the outstanding economic or monetary reports, JM Snyder’s International Money Line Weekly. He dealt recently with what he called The Second Coming of Hitler.

What he meant by this was the fact that when you have a dramatic inflation, you destroy the economy. You destroy the middle class. You set the stage for a totalitarian take over. He comments in this report and I quote, “Inflation sets the stage for dictatorship because it gives politicians a public purse that is never empty. Thus the basis is established for an ever-expanding bureaucracy to meet the ever increasing demands of the people. At the same time, inflation invalidates long term contracts, encourages the production of shoddy merchandise and destroys the integrity of the people. Individual enterprise is replaced by the development of corporate monopolies and large cartels such as OPEC. Meanwhile, the people get a feeling of increasing helplessness. The less people find they can depend on their savings and their individual efforts, the more they turn to bureaucracy until it becomes a conventional wisdom that the government has the final responsibility to solve all economic and social problems. Once this belief has been implanted, it is the short step from democracy to dictatorship, there has never been a dictator who was not claimed to represent the interest of the people.”

I think that Snyder has expressed the problem very, very ably. One would have to add however that the only alternative to a dictatorship is return to a Christian faith unless we again become Christian in a thoroughgoing sense, we will move to what he calls the second coming of Hitler, a return to a totalitarian condition all over the world.

Along the same lines one final note on the economic outlook, Paul Scott, one of our very best columnists in his September 21st column commented also on soaring interest costs well deficit. Now, the point he made in this very, very telling report was that by November 1, 1981, the national debt will top the $1 trillion mark.

Of this $1 trillion in national debt, more than 60% will be due between right now and October 1983. This means that the Reagan Administration faces the largest debt refinancing problem in the history of the United States.

On top of that, the current deficit is expected to be when the figures are available for the year which just ended September 30, at least 55 billion. Now, the interest payment in the year which began October 1 for this 55 billion will be $5.5 billion. In other words, our national debt is costing us more and more of our national income to refinance.

As a matter of fact, the total outlay for interest cost for the current fiscal year is estimated at nearly 90 billion, about 13% of all government expenses. This gives you some idea of the crisis that we are moving in to. We can expect almost anything from a money panic to massive inflation as the federal government tries to cope with this problem. What they will do, we do not yet know, but we are in a serious economic situation.

Now to go on to another matter, there is an interesting article in the William and Mary Quarterly, a magazine of early American history for July 1980 a year ago. It is in the second section of the journal entitled notes and documents. It is written by James Axtell and William C. Sturtevant entitled The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping?

Now I’m calling your attention to this because it has become so commonplace for historians to try to run down our path. God knows there are enough problems in any nation’s history. We have not yet had in human history a nation of angels. No one claims that American history was the product of angels. If you’re looking for evils, the history of any nation will give you evils and abundance, but what it is necessary for us to do is to look at the total picture to see what the basic thrust, the basic direction of the history of the people has been.

Substantially until recent times, American history has had a very important direction. It has had very, very serious problems. What we have seen is the exaggeration of the problems by many American historians who look to our past and besmirch it as much as possible while extolling certain aspects of the present.

In other words, because the past had a Christian character, anything bad has to be dredged up and ascribed to the Christianity of the day and because we are humanistic now of course, they see a great deal of good in the present humanistic order. Any rate, to return to this William and Mary Quarterly article, for a long time a great many historians have said and it has become virtually a commonplace statement that it was the white man who invented scalping and taught it to the Indians.

Well, now these two scholars refute that thesis. Scalping was an Indian practice. Now true, the coming of the white man taught it to some tribes that did not know about it because everything became fluid and because in some cases, bounties were offered during wartime for scalps to prove that so many Indians had been killed but scalping was not an invention of the white man. So much for that.

Now, to go to something else, a book written in 1970 no longer available and a book which did not accomplish its purpose, and that’s sad. The book is Jethro K. Lieberman, L-I-E-B-E-R-M-A-N, The Tyranny of the Experts, the subtitle How Professionals Are Closing the Open Society.

Now, by professionals, Lieberman means anyone who tries to say their work is a profession requires specialized training and licensing. So today, we have of course a wide variety of specialists. It can run into the hundreds depending on the state. Of course we’re used to thinking of one or two kinds of professions, pharmacy, medicine, nursing but now we have state boards regulating and licensing everything from morticians, accountants, architects, barbers, beauticians, gardeners, you name it.

Any time a group of people come together who have entered into a particular kind of work, they immediately tried to close the door to others in their field so that if you get enough people who are barbering dogs for example, they were organized into an association, then it becomes very important for them to keep out the amateurs, to keep out everybody who might compete with them so they go to the state legislature and demand that there be a licensing of their particular kind of work.

The legislature is ready to comply after all. It gives the state another bureaucracy and more power, and so a state board is created. A majority of the members of the state board of course are from the particular so-called profession that is going to be licensed. It becomes an excellent means of keeping outsiders from coming in. One of the people on the Chalcedon mailing list is a young man who has all kinds of training and surveying and from all reports from others, he is exceptionally good at this but he is in a state where by the way the demand for surveyors is at an all-time high. They have a state board, a small group that prefers to have people wait six months and more before they get a surveyor because then they can command the top prices for their work.

What happens to a young man like this young man? He must go and work with a professional licensed surveyor. Well, not altogether difficult. The surveyors have all the jobs they can handle and then some but precisely because he is good and he is somebody that people begin to respect because the work he does out in the field if he’s in charge of a crew is exceptionally good and quick.

If he is approved and no longer an apprentice, he’s going to be in competition with the man he’s working for. So what happens? He worked three years and longer before he gets license. If the man he’s working for wants to be contrary, he can refuse to give him a license to recommend him for one.

In other words, what we have today whether it’s plumbing or wiring or anything is a closed shop at the very start with the workers who say we’re going to have no competition in this field. I was told that in one big eastern city, it’s almost impossible now to become a plumber unless you are related to an already existing plumber and if you have plumbing problems, you pay a premium to get a plumber out there in a day or two or a week or so.

This is a kind of thing that’s happening. Lieberman wrote this book 10 years ago about this problem, and of course, nothing has happened. We have the tyranny of the so-called experts. We’re going to keep every field all to themselves. One thing we can be grateful for is that we do not have state licensing of a clergy. If we did, we would not have much religion left, you’d have a bad lot gaining control and saying nobody can be a minister without meeting our requirements. That would be the end of any sound and legal religion.

Well, this kind of thing is a problem. We’re going to have to break with this type of guild control because it’s like the medieval guilds if we’re going to have anything like a free society. I’m going to return now to an unpleasant subject but one which we dealt with the last time when we touched on the present desire on the part of many to abolish laws concerning incest. I’m going to start with the general subject of pornography.

There’s a little paperback published by InterVarsity Press Downers Grove, Illinois 60515 for 295 and the title is Photography: A Christian Critique, John H. Court, C-O-U-R-T. What Court does in this book is to give you the arguments of those who want to vindicate pornography either because they are in favor of pornography or on the basis of civil liberties. Now let me make a parenthetical note here, I wrote a book on the politics of photography a few years ago. I think there may be a few copies, a very small handful of them left and available from the Fairfax Christian Bookstore 11121 Popes Head Rd, Fairfax, VA 22030.

Now, I’m not sure the last time I talked, they had a handful of copies. The point I made in that book is important to an understanding of what I’m going to say about this book and to others that follow. The old pornography was made up of self-consciously dirty books. The new pornography is worse, but it goes back to de Sade and advances his thesis, that pornography represents the only real help but in a world in which there is no God and everything is permitted, pornography is the means for the liberation of men.

Now, this is definitely the goal of pornography. Court sees the origins of it quite rightly and men like Nietzsche and the death of God philosophy. When this kind of thought began to take over in the Western world and now throughout the world, it meant that the world was no longer God centered, that there was no longer any realms for distinguishing between good and evil. Man is not created in God’s image. He is only a product of chance events occurring through time.

As a result, for man to pretend that there are moral loss, moral distinctions, is a pretension. In fact, de Sade went so far as say and I quote, “The freest of all people are they who are most friendly to murder.” Now, this concept was stated very boldly by de Sade but it is implicit in the modern world view of there is no God, everything is permitted.

Of course these contemporary liberals and pornographers say provided that you do not hurt anyone, but why? If there is no good and evil, how can you draw a line and say that you cannot hurt man. Well, the humanist says we have made man our basic value. We’re no longer God-centered, we’re man-centered. But on what basis?

If one man says I believe that I am the ultimate value, another man can say you are an impediment to my values and you’re better off dead, how can you judge the one is right and the other is wrong? You abolished good and evil, you said man is the standard and every man has his standard then.

One man can say, “Murder is good,”and the other man says, “Murder is bad,” and both values are equally valid and equally meaningless. Moreover because the universe is a product of chance, what you then have to say is that everything is ultimately meaningless so why not murder? De Sade was honest. If you like the man who was friendly to murder, he felt he was the freest man because he had gotten rid of a God trip.

Well, Court gives you the arguments for pornography and then he does an excellent job in dealing with the false arguments and the false documentation. Supposedly in Denmark, the prevalence of pornography has helped the situation as far as the police are concerned. Let me quote, in the studies from Denmark both Benveniste and Kuchinsky provide evidence of the number of rapes reported to the Copenhagen police.

Unfortunately the two sets of figures failed to agree at any point nor do either Kuchinsky’s or Benveniste’s figures agree with those obtained independently from the police department in Copenhagen and for good measure within Benveniste paper, the figures for rape are given for 1966 and a table at 64 and on an associated graph as 50.

Kuchinsky gives 34 and the police confirmed 50. With such confusion, it is difficult to take seriously any discussion of trends. In other words, the documentation used to prove supposedly that pornography has meant a reduction in violent crime is clearly false. Moreover, as Court points out, there is a correlation between pornography, prostitution and drug peddling. It has not been proven that pornography decreases aggression quite the reverse.

Moreover as Court finds out very tellingly, pornography the only comes out of a background of a radical nihilism but it fosters and spreads a radical nihilism. Pornography, he says is antilife, anti-family, anti-human, anti-woman, anti-children, antisex and antisocial. It is also anti-environment, anti-community, anti-culture, anti-conscience and anti-God.

It is necessary for Christians to take it very seriously. It is a religious movement, and anti-Christian and humanistic movement of very deadly character. Well, so much for Court’s book. Let me say that court is a clinical psychologist in Australia and a professor of psychology at Flinders University. He has done in a very short compass of about 89 or 90 pages, an excellent study of the subject summing up the pro and con and coming out of course very strongly on the Christian side.

Now, we go on to another work in the same area. This one deals more specifically with the sexual revolution and its impact on children. The author is Dr. Sam Janus, J-A-N-U-S, a psychotherapist in New York City. He has been associated with state committees investigating the sexual exploitation of children and has a great deal of knowledge in this field. His work is titled The Death of Innocence, how our children are endangered by the new sexual freedom. It was published by William Morrow and Company in New York in 1981 and the price is $13.95.

There is by the way an excellent introduction to the book by Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber. The introduction itself is a gem. One of the problems, the introduction says by the way, is that we are in the midst of a time when the firm and fixed ideas of right and wrong have disappeared. The sexual revolution, Dr. Judianne Densen-Gerber says can be better called a sexual Holocaust.

Permissiveness is exalted. We have today people who a few years ago were regarded as repulsive criminals, demanding changes in the law and too often getting them. We have people demanding the rights to exploit children. We have a number of groups that most prominent members with mottos like this, “Sex by 8 or it’s too late.”

We have the fact that psychiatric associations now are responding to the pressure of these people and are altering the classification of long-standing perversions into ostensible health. Homosexuality for example is no longer classified as a form of mental sickness or perversion but is classified by psychiatrists as normal. The various groups such as the British Paedophilic Information Exchange is insisting that the age of consent be lowered to four years.

Denmark no longer has legal sanctions against non-forceful incest. Sweden defeated a similar measure by one vote only. The British Royal commission has recommended that all age of consent laws be abolished. Dr. Janice tells us that 300,000 children have been used by pornographers to service the adult market. Quite rightly, it can be said as this book states the American system hates its children.

We are told that in Sweden, children over six years old can divorce their parents and live in a choice of foster homes. The situation is such that sexuality among young children is increasing. As a matter of fact, the department of health education and welfare in this country is reported that in 1978, 9000 babies are born to girls 11 years old and younger.

Most colleges now say that drug use and sex behavior are not their concerns. Runaway children are increasing. Dr. Janice estimates that there are approximately 1,300,000 runaway children in the United States. Most of these wind up as boy prostitutes and girl prostitutes, and so on and on, what we have is a complete break with biblical morality. Dr. Janice says that liberation has become libertinism.

Sexual revolution has affected all of American society, most dramatically American women. The only children that Dr. Janice and others have found who are immune by and large for this trend in our society today are those with strong religious beliefs and or who also felt loved by their parents.

Researchers have found that parents’ income raise socioeconomic background and the like were of no significance in affecting children’s choices of moral codes. Dr. Janice says our classification of runaway children needs to be altered. They are largely throwaway children but in some instances where these runaways are picked up by the police, these are very young runaways in many cases and taken back to their homes the parents invite the children to get out.

Dr. Janice documents cases of mothers trying to force their daughters into the sexual revolution, into promiscuity and regarding them as inhibited if they refuse. The data is compelling and frightening. What he has to say about child sex is quite horrifying and the extent to which it prevails. He says and I quote, “He’s dealing with the so-called Revere case in Revere, Massachusetts. The discovery of a large call boy operation there shocked residents of the city and state. Over 250 boys were available for sex anywhere on the Massachusetts area for $50 and up. The purveyor is a child psychiatrist, head master of exclusive New England schools and administrators of state institutions responsible for safeguarding institutionalized boys. What shocked people was that the adults involved either as purveyors or as clients were not peculiar [narrative 00:34:54] wells or drifters. They were solid citizens respected members of the community.”

Moreover, what was discovered was the purveyor was just one branch of a national network with headquarters in Houston. These organizations are powerful. They can hire as one did a retired professor to become a spokesman for the pederast movement. They are able to exert tremendous political pressure on Congress and on the states and to hound and persecute anyone who talks against them.

In fact, I know two men on our mailing list who had to have unlisted phones because of the threats they were receiving when their position was known. We have major so-called men’s magazines promoting the sexual revolution and even child exploitation. We do have a very critical situation.

Well, much more could be said, but I think this is enough.

Oh, let me give one little item. Quoting the accounts of things in New York City. There are 800 pimps working this area alone. They control thousands and thousands of girls. At least six of them were on call services. You can pay for these kids with your MasterCard. They’re really telephone answering services and they arrange everything between the client and the child prostitute.

The word on the streets stays as the pimp says sardonically is John’s prefer chickens. The pimps prefer to use call services. They can risk sending their chickens to apartments and offices and homes because they can verify phone numbers and addresses. A lot of the hungry kids on the street will sell themselves for five or $10, but $20 is the going price and a call boy can get $45 up to $100 or even 200$.

Of course the pimp gets most of it. Well, to go briefly to one more book on this subject, Dr. Frank DuMas, D-U capital M-A-S, a psychologist has written a book, “Gay is not good.” It was published in 1979 by Thomas Nelson, New York and Nashville. The price is 11.95. Dr. DuMas does in this book which concentrates on the homosexuals call attention to their war against the family and against Christianity. They are demanding that our language of course be de-sexed so that no gender exist in our speech and in our writings so that we talk about chairpersons and the like.

But all organized religions be condemned for helping in the genocide of homosexuals, that both psychiatry and psychology, advocate equality for all forms of sexual behavior but the family as we know it be abolished. DuMas is here giving some of the platforms of the homosexual demands. That all children be placed in communal care away from their parents with boys and girls reared the same and cared for by adults or under the direction of lesbian women.

That our society should prohibit the rearing of girls as girls and boys as boys and foster a kind of unisex role for all children. Let a woman militia be set up to defend the demands of women. The children should not be reared by the mother and father because these two role models are too restrictive and so on and on. You had better believe these people mean business, they are organized all over the country and in Washington DC as well as in the state capitals through pressure for and demand the kind of legislation they want.

There is scarcely a legislature where their impact is not being felt and where laws are not being subtly reworded and altered to meet their demands. Now, I’m going to go to another subject but also dealing with revolution. This is a book that we here are carrying at Ross House Books. We bought the remainder of the printing by a New York publisher.

When they found out what was in the book, they tried to kill it and we were able to buy it before it was discarded, and destroyed or whatever. It is by one of our own group, Otto J Scot, Robespierre: The Voice of Virtue. You can have it by writing to Ross House Books cost is $9.95. This book is urgent to understand what is happening here because it began with the French Revolution, the triumph of political humanism. The French Revolution had as its goal the destruction of Christianity, the creation of a new man centered society.

[Mrabo 00:42:40] went so far as to say concerning the test of a revolution, of any society and I quote in the last analysis, the people will judge the revolution by one consideration and one only, will it put more money in their pockets, will they be able to live more easily.” Now when you reduce life to such propositions, hedonistic and economic, you created a society in which anything goes and which every standard and every person will be satisfied to gratify the demands of the mob.

Of course the French Revolution exalted the mob and the mob prevailed. Very few books give us the true story of the reign of terror because first of all, most writers tend to be pro-revolution. Second the full story is hardly fit to tell.

For example, this is the flavor of the revolution, the French Revolution and things have only become worse since then. I quote, mobs armed with pikes, sabers, clubs, knives, daggers and pistols organized and led by the commune section leaders emerged from the districts and surged around the prisons flooded into the courtyards to assist the executioners. Watchers told the women and men alike falling on the bodies of those executed, hacking off their heads, separating torsos, waving genitals aloft and pinning limbs to their pikes, some grizzly parades began or as Steve dela [Bratton 00:44:49 ] watching [inaudible 00:44:50] said, “A woman appeared white as a sheet, a killer grabbed her, tore off her dress and slit her belly open and she fell and was finished off. [Jacques Charle Herroelen 00:45:02], a 41-year-old Parisian joined in the dismemberment.

He was with the crowd that carried the woman’s head into a wine shop and placed it on the counter while drinks were ordered, was accused of roasting and eating her heart before the others carrying her genitals around on his sword. Inside the temple prison, a municipal guard looked out the window and watch the crowds arrive with a particular head on a pike conveyed to the temple especially to exhibit before the Queen. And so on and on, of course the anti-Christianity was especially intense. Christianity was the number one enemy, not the monarchy. As a result, the churches were desecrated, people fornicated in the church aisles and on the benches, on the altar and on the [inaudible 00:46:10] lots and did everything they could to defame and desecrate everything connected with faith.

The horrors that were perpetrated against Christianity were staggering. Of course this we are not told normally because after all why call attention to something that will upset people especially when you’re in favor of it and you would rather see the whole world deChristianized as our humanist today emphatically do want to see. Well, the basic creed of the French Revolution was and I quote, “All is permitted to those who act in the revolutionary direction, all is permitted to those who act in the revolutionary direction.”

In other words, if you are a revolutionist, you are anti-Christian and you are bent on destroying everything every day that is connected with God and his law then you are moral. Well so much for Robespierre, a book well worth reading but now to bring it up to date, very few people are aware because this is kind of news is not front-page news. It’s happening all over the world in country after country but we have a little book, a paperback written by Vek, V-E-K Huong, H-U-O-N-G Taing, T-A-I-N-G, Ordeal in Cambodia published by Here’s Life Publishers PO Box 1576, San Bernardino, B as in Boy, E-R-N-A-R-D-I-N-O CA 92402 for 395.

Cambodia was taken over by the Communists, Khmer Rouge, in 1975. From 1975 to 1980, the Communists executed nearly half the population of Cambodia, nearly half, 50%. This kind of thing is so commonplace today in various parts of the world that it’s no longer front-page news. Very little of this got into the press but what happened in various countries in Africa or of course in China and the Soviet Union and what may happen before too long and some Western European countries because France is on the road back to Robespierre.

Well the Taings lived in Phnom Penh, and Phnom Penh, a city of 2 million was evacuated in three days. The pretext was that the Americans were going to attack Cambodia and drop atomic weapons on the city. The real reason was that they wanted to destroy all the existing civilization, the cities, the culture, the everything. As a matter of fact, for six reasons, anyone could be executed, and Mr. Taing what’s the six reasons? He and his wife could have qualified for all six and it was only the miraculous grace of God that preserved them. He says and I quote, “We could’ve been put to death for any one of six reasons, we were Christians, we were college graduates. We had worked for an American organization, we were from a large urban area. We had traveled out of the country before the fall, my brother was a major in the deposed Lon Nol Army.”

For those six reasons, they could have been executed. Of course, the fact that they could read and write was another round in terms of which they could’ve been executed because there was a hatred against literacy. That is anyone who is literate before the revolution because it meant they had a knowledge of a way of life which they did not want people to have and that is why the old cities had to be destroyed to eliminate that kind of contact with the old civilization.

Mr. Taing writes and I quote, “Not only had the Khmer Rouge impounded on all radios they could find but all books, magazines, newspapers and letters received. And no one was granted access to reading material of any kind. We were also denied writing paper and pens or pencils. This banishment of the written word extended far beyond the individual Cambodian. I learned later that in 1975, entire city and university libraries had been burned to the ground leaving in ashes much of the documentation of the nation’s culture and history. That was precisely the motivation behind such destruction. After all, a new Cambodia had come.”

Well I could go on telling you more about this, I have met and heard the Taings, the situation there is not over. More and more people are being executed all the time and all this in the name of creating a new life, a new world order. We do live in grim times. Now more than ever, it is important for Christians to work harder, to pray more and to give more because there is no other way than through the return to Christ that we can change this world.

Now from all that I have said today and it has been a grim day maybe because I have a cold. I’m not my usual self and pick these things although I did have some other things in mind that I won’t be able to get to perhaps. I do want to repeat this this is from an older book which is republished not too long ago by James and Klock Christian publishers in Minneapolis for 895, William Henry Green, The Argument of the Book of Job Unfolded.

Green said something with regard to Satan here that I think we do need to remind ourselves of and I quote it, “Because I believe it’s something we need to remember and lastly the temptations of Satan were down to the glory of divine grace. It belongs to the magnificence of God’s universal government, an opposition and hostility to whatever degree and from whatever quarter instead of tending to thwart or retard his plans, invariably contribute to further and promote them. Satan forms no exception. This arch fiend with all his legions and the entire kingdom of evil which he instigates and controls in spite of their gathered forces and formidable numbers and subtle craft and hellish spite is absolutely powerless to prevent or to retard the execution of the least of God’s designs. And now this sentence, an infant in the arms is not more impotent to arrest the movement of the spheres than Satan is to check the fulfillment of God’s sovereign decrees.”

Remember that. God has his purpose in what’s happening in the world today and his purpose is going to mean a triumph of our faith. Well I think I’m going to turn to something in the very limited time left or perhaps I won’t have time but I’ll lay the groundwork for it for next time. I had a third grade teacher who was a marvelous woman. I never saw a teacher make a class work better than she did. Even the sluggers in the class got their work done in time. If they didn’t, they’d get clobbered out on the playground at recess time or after school.

What she did was late in the day, if everyone had done their work and had been good, she had a book, always one book or another and she’d take it off the shelf and read it to us if we had been good. She was a superb reader. We would work hard to be able to earn that reading and we’d sit there entranced while she read from one thing or another. It gave me a joy for reading aloud which I’ve often enjoyed doing with my children and now from time to time with the grandchildren.

I’m going to from time to time dig up some of my favorite things and read them to you but maybe I can squeeze in now one poem that was running in my mind in occasion this. It’s by Francis Thompson, The Kingdom of Heaven in No Strange Land,

O world invisible, we view thee. O world intangible, we touch thee. O world unknowable, we know thee. Inapprehensible, we clutch thee! Does the fish soar to find the ocean, the eagle plunge to find the air. That we ask of the stars in motion. If they have rumor of thee there? Not where the wheeling systems darken, and our benumbed conceiving soars! The drift of pinions, would we hearken, beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.

The angels keep their ancient places. Turn but a stone and start a wing! ’Tis ye, ’tis your estrangèd faces, that miss the many-splendored thing. But when so sad thou canst not sadder. Cry, and upon thy so sore loss. Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder. Pitched between Heaven and Charing Cross. Yea, in the night, my Soul, my daughter, cry, clinging Heaven by the hems; and lo, Christ walking on the waters. Not of Genesareth, but Thames!

Beautiful, is it not? Written by a man who suffered a great deal, a Londoner. Perhaps I’ll tell you more about him some other time and read something else. That’s it for today, I’ll look forward to visiting with you again in a couple of weeks. Thank you and God bless you.

Male: Thank you for listening to The Easy Chair with R. J. Rushdoony. Please visit chalcedon.Eedu for more materials by R. J. Rushdoony and the Chalcedon Foundation.

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