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I wrote this a couple of years ago after being challenged by someone on Twitter to write a sonnet about the "Magic Circle".
A sonnet: verse, but not poetry.
About two thousand years ago, twelve men,
None a Greek decadent, nor Roman swell,
Met a mere Carpenter, as the Gospels tell,
And changed the world. With works, prayer, tongue, and pen
They touched hearts, minds with Fire. Again and again
Viking, Dane, Moor, and Tartar failed to quell
Its clarity and warmth. But last befell
That misread Council of the Vatican.
Smiling clerical traitors set to work.
Gently more fatal than the warlike Turk,
Bishops and intellectualisers broke
The Papal bond. Imposed a newer yoke.
In Mary's Dowry they smirk, "Ditch the traditions!
Trust not in Popes, but Circular Magicians!"
I came across John Stewart Mackenzie, (1860-1935) while helping with the translation into Polish of a book by an English theologian. Mackenzie was a rather old-fashioned philosopher, in that he regarded philosophy as a tool for living well, rather than as a purely academic study.
He wrote, following Voltaire up to the first comma:
“Tyranny is usually tempered with assassination, and Democracy must be tempered with culture. In the absence of this, it turns into a representation of collective folly.”
This statement illuminates so much of the present condition of Europe and its collective madness. Without Culture (in the sense used by Matthew Arnold rather than by anthropologists, sociologists, and politicians), and most importantly without religion, men and women are ruled only by their fitful, fleeting appetites.
England has many people to thank for the destruction of culture: Harold Wilson, the wretched Crossland, all those who out of spite or political Luddism wrecked the education system: politicians, clergy, educators, teacher trainers, and teachers, who sold the pass.
In or around 1979, a group of us, after canvassing for the Conservatives in Putney, stopped for a beer in a local pub garden. There was a barrister among us, who told the following story, which I believe to have been true:
I was talking to my Head of Chambers (at his Inn of Court) the other day, and he pointed out of the window to the quad and said, I've had a quote."
What for?
Seating for up to (I forget the number of) people, a scaffold, and a multiple gallows.
What for?
To hang the last Labour government.
The Q.C. who said this, while obviously a brilliant lawyer, was perhaps, a bit eccentric in his wish for the public execution of those who had destroyed so much of what was good in England.
Perhaps better hard labour for life.
T E Hulme is reported to have written, “An institution is only finally overthrown when it has taken into itself the ideas of its opponents".
Am I the only Catholic feeling uncomfortable with this thought?
