The Internet and television news are awash in stories about our debacle in Afghanistan. Just yesterday I counted upwards of forty news accounts and reports in my inbox, and they are only the ones I noticed. Among the so-called “conservative” commentariat, Fox News continues to beat the drum of how “America has been unnecessarily defeated and shamed,” and, indeed, somehow if we had just stayed and finished the goal of “nation-building” (militarily and socially), we might have avoided this humiliating and embarrassing disaster.

In other words, despite the past twenty years with boots on the ground and several thousand American lives lost, and over one trillion dollars in American (taxpayer) funding—and nothing accomplished, if only we would have stayed a little longer, everything would have come out right. Thus, a full-fledged liberal democracy, complete with the full panoply of women’s rights, abortion, protection of LGBTX rights and social advancement, same sex marriage for all, immense welfare programs, diversity and equity programs in those to-be-built Afghani schools, the fruits of American television programs like “The Bachelorette” –all that and more, plus the wonders of American-style elections (a model of probity and honesty!), would have transformed that woebegotten country.

How foolish, how fatal!

Our foreign policy elites, the State Department, the Pentagon, and most of our national political class apparently have learned nothing. Not with Vietnam, not with Bosnia, not with Somalia, nor with Iraq, Syria, and now Afghanistan. With each disaster it is simply on to the next involvement, the next venture which puts Americans on the ground, dying in some remote desert or forlorn oasis, with the major corporate suppliers of military hardware and weaponry continuing to amass fortunes, while our boys perish, lose limbs, and suffer conditions that will mark them—and their families—for life. And all in the name of “democracy” and “human rights.”

Since the end of World War II our foreign policy has been dominated by a resolve globally to deter perceived enemies. At first there was some real urgency and rationale for that: we were facing an insatiable and dangerous enemy, Soviet communism. And at times it looked like we might succumb. But after 1991 and the ignominious fall of the Soviets and the advent of a new Russian government intent on recovering its pre-revolutionary traditions and religious heritage, that threat disappeared.

Yet our foreign policy elites, now emboldened by the rise and influence of the Neoconservatives, those former Marxist internationalists who had made the long pilgrimage to the conservative Right, continued to look for ways to assert American hegemony in the world. With a fervor inherited from their days militating as Trotskyites (as many of them had been in the 1930s and ‘40s), the Neocons deployed the linguistic template and ideas associated with “American exceptionalism” to signify the universal superiority of their conception of the American experience over all other cultures. A Neoconservative-favored political thinker Allan Bloom summed this view up succinctly in his The Closing of the American Mind: “And when we Americans speak seriously about politics we mean that our principles of freedom and equality and the rights based on them are rational and everywhere applicable.” Americans must engage in “an educational experiment undertaken to force those who do not accept these principles to do so.”

Thus, each time we fail in a foreign venture, as we have done consistently over the past fifty years, our foreign policy wonks and Neocon experts and publicists push forward: there must be some other backward country that needs American guidance and just maybe some troops on the ground, and millions of dollars of American aid and military equipment?

But the real issues related to Afghanistan, Islam and various remote locations on the map of the world get lost, essentially ignored by Foggy Bottom. And there are indeed major issues and questions that we should examine, especially pertaining to Afghanistan and particularly to the Middle East.

There is a fascinating movie, "Day of the Siege: September 11, 1683," which portrays in some detail the Muslim siege of Vienna in 1683, specifically making reference to the final climactic battle on September 11 (!), when the Polish Lancers of the Christian hero, King Jan Sobieski defeated the forces of Islam. But there is the prophecy of the Muslim Grand Vizier, Kara Mustapha, that even if the Muslims did not take Vienna then, that a future generation would "water their horses in the Tiber River" and "convert Notre Dame Cathedral into a mosque." Is that not happening now? There is a DVD of the movie (also a much longer version). Apparently it is out of print but can be obtained in decent used copies.

I think the essential point here is that unlike the Crusaders and the Christian defenders of Christendom at the Battle of Lepanto or at the two sieges of Vienna, we now face the Islamic threat for the wrong reasons. We seek to impose "liberal democracy" and (secular) "human rights" on essentially primitive countries  that are far more in tune with the orthodoxy of Islam than to LGBT rights and women’s "liberation" (which is about all I hear being spouted by the likes of vicious anti-Confederate Brian Kilmeade on Fox). 

Instead of crusades for our historic faith and Western Christian civilization, we offer the venomous infection of "American exceptionalism," which is now an olio of the secularist globalist virus which is destroying us here at home.

​Thus what we have seen in Kabul, or in Iraq, or in Somalia, or in Bosnia, or in Syria, when our nation has attempted to impose a secularist framework, and is opposed by a concerted and fanatical religious opposition which has popular support.

In effect, we have become an agent of modernist destruction. Oftentimes we may indeed be opposing an evil, but for the wrong reasons, and thus opposing one evil with one, in some ways, even more evil and fearsome.

After World War II we imposed the very worst features of "liberal democracy" on what was left of traditional Europe via the Marshall Plan. Anything that smacked of "traditional" was either disauthorized or discredited (as "fascist" or pro-Nazi). We sent our agents to infiltrate and control new, liberal democratic political parties...and very soon they controlled and dominated Europe. And, yes, we see what the result of that has been. Now we wish to do that in Hungary and Russia.

Cardinal Pedro Segura in Spain, back in 1953, sternly warned General Franco NOT to open the door to "the panoply of novel and noxious American secularist culture"--that Spain would absorb it and eventually "lose its soul." That indeed happened, as I observed first hand while completing my doctoral dissertation in Pamplona (1972-1975). The tawdry worst of America was injected into Spanish society, and eventually it destroyed much of historic Spanish tradition, like a virulent cancer.

And we continue to seek that in regard to Hungary and Russia. Why? Because they limit and prohibit LGBT "human rights" and favor the traditional family over what now prevails here in the USA, that they formally oppose "Coca-Cola Culture." Most establishment conservatives now accept--even defend--same sex marriage and transgenderism (did you see Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk dancing with a "conservative" drag queen? Fox touts its openly gay and same sex married pundits, such as Guy Benson and Tammy Bruce). 

Our conservative and Republican leadership takes pains and great effort to protest how much they love Martin Luther King (and his radical views), the Civil Rights revolution, Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and how much they loathe the “traitors” Robert E. Lee, John C. Calhoun and Nathan Bedford Forrest. Oh, yes, they call a halt when it comes to maybe Washington or Lincoln, but only because they can use them ideologically in their own form of "conservative" progressivism. 

So, I am happy we are getting out of Afghanistan; we shouldn't have been there, just like my cousin-by-marriage wondered why we were in Bosnia fighting Christian Serbs, and allied to Muslim extremists in Kosovo. We are either in such places for the wrong reasons, or we are in the wrong places to begin with. Period. 

The one thing that is tragic is, of course, the bungling by the Biden administration getting us and our citizens out. That is worthy of sharp criticism. That should make us re-examine our wrongheaded foreign policy of the past 50 or 75 years.  But I doubt strongly that it will...as we are no longer a truly Christian nation and our leaders are in no way like King Jan Sobieski or Don Juan of Austria at Lepanto....far from it. How in the hell can we compare a witless Joe Biden or the empty-suit Kamala Harris to them?  

Until we have leaders leading a nation committed to our traditional and Christian principles, what happened in Afghanistan will continue to happen.  

More likely, what we behold is a continuation of the sputtering end of the "American empire," and, in the long run, maybe that is a good thing?

​
Growing up in mostly-rural North Carolina, most of my friends and especially their parents could go on a bit about their family backgrounds, about their familial histories. Most of my friends—like me—had great-grandfathers or great-great-grandfathers who had served in Confederate ranks back in 1861-1865. Pride in family and in our ancestors was taken for granted, a devout appreciation we all shared.

Especially during the centennial commemorations of the early 1960s, most of us youngsters took an intense interest in all the various events, the re-enactments on a large scale and the ceremonies attending the anniversary. Our imaginations were filled with stories of heroism, sacrifice, honor, tragic defeat and attendant suffering, unrealized dreams, and legends and traditions passed down to us. Public schools back then actually encouraged this fascination and interest in history and the characters and personalities in it who seemed, almost like magic, to come alive once again.

Indeed, it had been scarcely a decade since the last Confederate veteran had passed away in 1959! Many of us could recall that. And our parents? They had grown up surrounded by the ever-decreasing ranks of those valiant veterans, listening to first-hand accounts of the great and heartbreaking epic that was the War for Southern Independence. 

My grandfather on my mother’s side was Henry Johnson Perry. Granddad Perry was born in Raleigh in 1877 and lived until 1962. As a young boy I remember well him recounting to me standing hatless on old Fayetteville Street in North Carolina’s capital on May 30, 1893, a sixteen year old apprentice, dressed all in black, with thousands of other citizens reverently paying tribute to President Jefferson Davis, whose remains were carried by horse-drawn caisson from the railroad station to lie in state under the rotunda of the historic North Carolina State Capitol, en route to his final resting place in Richmond.

Granddad’s father, Josiah Hunter Perry, an official with the old Raleigh & Gaston Railroad, had been forced in April 1865 by General Sherman to conduct him and his staff by rail over to Bennitt Station (now Durham) to receive the surrender of General Joseph Johnston.  Waiting for the surrender to occur, he sat under a cherry tree and carved a “peace pipe,” a relic I still have and which continues to remind me of my history and my ancestor.

Granddad’s grand-father, Robert, had served many years in the North Carolina legislature in the 1820s and had married the grand-daughter of Isaac Hunter, the founder of Raleigh. All that family—all that history—danced through my imagination sixty years ago; I could visualize it, I could see it in my mind’s eye. It was real, it was present…and despite the many years that have elapsed, it still is.

Pride in one’s ancestry…pride in what the late Southern writer and historian Mel Bradford termed “remembering who we are”…was integral to defining what we valued and held dear in life. We were intimately related to our ancestors, they were part of us. Their blood coursed through our veins. Their memory was not that far removed. Their examples stood before us as models to emulate, a challenge for us to uphold their honor and their noble efforts to defend home, family, and the rights vouchsafed to them by their fathers and ancestors…who had cobbled together the older American confederation.

In any nation, in any people or civilization worthy of the name, such an appreciation is natural, part of the national and cultural psyche. It is indeed quite normal for a people to recall its past, to celebrate its successes and heroes, to lament its defeats and hardships. These are part and parcel of what define and make us, as Bradford states, “who we are.” Deprive a people of its history, of its traditions, of its inherited culture, and you deprive it of essential ingredients of its very existence. It becomes a mass of rootless individuals, of automatons, subject to the latest whim or the most persistent and enticing siren voice of some powerful ideology or, in modern times, of George Orwell’s Big Brother and its extensive tentacles in and incestuous partnership with the communications industry, education, and the media.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky has one of the three brothers in his novel The Brothers Karamazov declare, “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.” Stripping people of their faith, and then denuding them of the essential characteristics which define them is and has always been the work of Revolutions, whether of the Cromwellian attempt in the 17th century, the fanaticism of a Robespierre in France in the late 18th, or the genocide of the Marxists in Russia and China in the 20th.  As now, in our day the lunatics who run our schools and colleges, dominate our entertainment, spout our daily news, and control our politics, whether it be the Democrats or the Republicans, do the same with unalloyed frenzy. They make the spectre of “Big Brother” look like a Sunday school teacher.

My dissertation topic years back at the University of Navarra in Spain, Juan Vazquez de Mella, stated it this way:

“Who has ever seen ‘the individual,’ if not defined by his family, his region, his profession, his language, his inheritance, his faith? Removed from these defining characteristics the individual is an abstraction, and a political system based on an abstraction must either end in despotism or revolution.”

Since the 1980s and ‘90s, we have seen the almost unrestrained and rapacious growth of an eventually fatal cancer within our body politic. Denominated variously as “progressivism,” “neo-“ or “post-Marxism,” and more recently as “anti-racism” or “the movement for equity,” it draws its force intellectually from the concept of the Idea of Progress, that is, that history unfolds irresistibly in one direction—the “progressive” direction—which encompasses the ineluctable advance and triumph of essentially secular and globalist ideas. At base it is egalitarian, and even though it may profess respect for or even belief in God, its cumulative effects are to pervert, weaken and, finally, destroy the natural linkage between man and his Creator. For the progressivist, religion, particularly the Christian religion, becomes just one more obstacle to be tamed, neutralized, and lastly, employed in the advance to a universal secular utopia.

It was not that traditional society was opposed to advances in science or economics; it was not. But such innovations were seen as a natural part of the flourishing of God’s Creation, not opposed to it or superseding it.

The great stratagem of Marx and Lenin and their votaries was to expropriate “progress” and weaponize it: the proletariat, united, under the leadership of the self-anointed heads of the Revolution would lead the “oppressed” to victory, to that utopia where there was no want, no poverty, no sadness, where everyone was equal and happy. 

Throughout history different revolutions have shared these characteristics, have made these promises, and each time the result has been a terrible dystopian nightmare.

The full attack in recent years on Southern traditions, identity, and iconography is but a symptom, an element of an all-out assault on Western Christian civilization, its culture, and belief.  Prominent members of the official opposition “conservative movement”—a Rich Lowry at National Review, a Brian Kilmeade at Fox News, or a Ben Shapiro, and any number of others—attempt to compartmentalize the ongoing “culture war” by accepting, even applauding the eradication of any visible sign of Confederate and Southern history. But like temporizers in any revolution they fail to understand the futility of their positions, which only abet the appetite of the radicals.

Whether a Kerensky and the Social Revolutionaries who helped usher in Lenin’s rise to power in Russia, or the Girondins who believed they could somehow harness the revolutionary fury in late 18th century France, moderation and attempts to placate the madness and hysteria of revolutionary zealots are doomed to disaster. Half-measures never work.

There is a whimsical episode in the superb historical film, “Waterloo” (1970), which illustrates exactly the position of Establishment Conservatives and their “opposition” to the fanatical tsunami of violent revolution: an illiterate private in the Welsh Guards who has engaged in plunder and stolen a young pig, cautions the pig not to squeal, not to alert those around him of his plunder (a capital offense under military rules). “Be quiet,” he tells the pig, “and I’ll only eat half of you!” Confronted by shrill and seemingly overwhelming demands by a noisy nucleus of woke leftists, authorized conservatives and Republicans respond to the revolutionaries in the same manner: “Only kill us half-way, but please, oh please, don’t call us racists!” 

The recent attacks on Southern monuments and symbols, which are essentially an assault on Southern identity, cannot be dissociated from a broader offensive by our modern “progressivists” on Western civilization. To think otherwise is worse than wrongheaded, it is fatal. 

In the contemporary South the great success of the revolutionaries has been to atomize much of society, deprive large portions of it, especially the young, of those inherited traditions, those customs, those beliefs—those memories—which have given it substance and continuity, which have served as its shield and buckler. Instead of what Southern writer Richard Weaver called a communitarian “social bond individualism,” life centered around family and church, and indelibly defined by region and custom, progressivism breaks and severs those bonds, isolates individuals, and renders them subject to the social decay and dislocation which an omnipotent managerial state, in league with woke capitalism, utilizes to advance its vision of a future society.

In the past I have urged the termination of the public school system—privatizing education and putting it back in the hands of the parents where it belongs. I have authored several pieces on the possibilities for secession, or, rather, the separation of various American states and counties (perhaps the best and most peaceful means to resolve the irreducible differences within the American citizenry, if it were possible). But more importantly, I have advocated a return, a rededication to those principles and that belief which once motivated and annealed our ancestors. That spirit, that wisdom, that inspiration is there, it is still there for those who seek it. Scraping away the ugly dross of political correctness and “wokeness” we can recover those memories, rekindle them, and draw from them strength. 

In his work, Requiem for A Nun (1951), Southern novelist William Faulkner says of his fellow Southerners that for them, “The past is never dead. It's not even past."

One of the most remarkable poems of the 20th century is by the incomparable Southern Agrarian Donald Davidson. Titled “Lee in the Mountains,” it summons us once more to the battle lines and to eventual victory, if we have faith and an unshakeable commitment to our cause. For, in the end, God will not forsake us. We must be like Gideon’s small army and General Forrest’s “critter company.”

Sense the confidence that springs from our Christian faith and which Davidson reminds us of:

Young men, the God of your fathers is a just
And merciful God Who in this blood once shed
On your green altars measures out all days,
And measures out the grace
Whereby alone we live;
And in His might He waits,
Brooding within the certitude of time,
To bring this lost forsaken valor
And the fierce faith undying
And the love quenchless
To flower among the hills to which we cleave,
To fruit upon the mountains whither we flee,
Never forsaking, never denying
His children and His children’s children forever
Unto all generations of the faithful heart. 

This piece was previously published on MyCorner on August 13, 2021.

I have a good friend who continually asks me what I think are the prospects for sensible, conservative—that is, normal—folks in these parlous times, what I think will happen to these United States, and particularly, what will happen to the South.

In response to his questioning, I can’t give a satisfactory answer, at least one nicely tied-up and tidy like my friend wants. But one thing on which my friend and I agree: this weary and gravely ailing country we call the United States seems with accelerating velocity and intensity to be hurtling into some form of ignominious and painful expiration. The unbridgeable differences, the divisions, between segments of our population are now far too stark, far too bitter, far too advanced to be papered over by “the next election”—or, by the pipe-dreams that I hear some Republicans and Fox News pundits exude with enthusiasm: “We’ll win back Congress in 2022! And then things will get right again.”

My response to that line of thinking is to remind such optimists that Republicans had control of Congress—and the presidency—for several years, and essentially, despite some line cracks in the Deep State behemoth due to Donald Trump, things continued to get worse, the Managerial government continued to grow in power, and did its best (with many Republicans in tow), eventually successfully, to eject the Trumpster from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. The Administrative elites control education, control immigration policy (with GOP collaboration), control our media and entertainment, and dominate most of the levels of our government; and their reach and control expand by the day.
​
I believe that assertion is self-evident, but let me offer a few very recent headlines at random to buttress what I’m saying:

Research Journal Publishes Article Calling ‘Whiteness’ a ‘Parasitic-Like Condition’  (June 10, 2021)

White House ‘Domestic Extremism’ Report Puts Target on Democrats’ Political Opponents (June 17, 2021)

The FBI’s Mafia-Style Justice: To Fight Crime, the FBI Sponsors 15 Crimes a Day (June 18, 2021)

What this Professor just Called Proper Grammar is Absolutely Absurd (June 30, 2021)

Yale Professor Wants Your Kid to See Sex at Pride Parades so they’re not ‘Homophobes’ (July 14, 2021)

Med Schools Are Now Denying Biological Sex  (July 27, 2021)

‘Complicit’: Meet the 18 Republicans Who Sold Out on Radical Democrat ‘Infrastructure’ Plan Without Reading Bill (July 28, 2021)

Biden Department of Justice Threatens to Sue to Lock In 2020 Election Chaos (July 29, 2021)
 
And these stories and accounts can be multiplied by the hundreds, by the thousands, at every level of society. Tune in to “Tucker Carlson Tonight” almost any day (the only program I consistently watch on Fox News), and you’ll see what I mean.

They are examples of a pervasive sickness which afflicts large portions of our culture. They are emblematic of profound problems and radically irreconcilable divisions among our population. We all may live in the same geographical entity, but we don’t speak the same language, we don’t share the same beliefs, we don’t think in the same way; one half of us wish to “cancel,” even suppress the other half of us, and to achieve that by any means possible, including violence. Is that any different from the few months in Eastern European countries right after World War II as Communist apparatchiks infiltrated and seized absolute control and authority?

And all the while the official voices of opposition to this madness…the official conservative opposition and most national Republicans…seem like deer caught in the headlights. Irish poet William Butler Yeats’ words resound in my ears:

“The best lack all conviction, while the worst/
Are full of passionate intensity.” (“The Second Coming,” 1919)

In the past when a Southern writer would suggest that some form of secession or separation was desirable, he would be met with ridicule: “The South will rise again? You’ve got to be kidding!”

Now, 160 years after the War Between the States began, such talk of separation is no longer considered the domain of nostalgics or of the Unreconstructed. In recent years we have seen the Calexit movement advocating that left-leaning California leave the American union and assert its independence. A number of conservative counties in eastern Oregon and northern California have officially petitioned to leave those radicalized states and either join Idaho or perhaps form a new state.  Academically, Professor Frank H. Buckley (George Mason University) has written a cautionary study on what he calls the “looming threat” of secession.

Over the past few years I have written about some possible scenarios, situations that might actually come to pass.  I’ve speculated about secession, or perhaps better expressed, some form of separation of portions of the country—and not just states—into more philosophically and culturally homogeneous entities.

I’ve written about this several times, most notably in The Abbeville Institute (August 2, 2019, “Is It Time for America to Break Apart?” and also on August 19, 2019,  “Is Political Separation in Our Future?”). Indeed, I also tackled the topic in The Unz Review (July 26, 2019), with the essay picked up by the widely-read LewRockwell.com site (July 29, 2019).

I have suggested that some form of separation, including possibly large amounts of autonomy for counties within certain states might be the least painful, the least violent means of resolving our unsolvable divisions. Yet, does anyone believe that our centralized and centralizing federal government in Washington, with its tentacles now extending dictatorially into every aspect of our lives, would let this occur peacefully?  Would not federal troops be dispatched by Washington that would make Abraham Lincoln’s suppression of the constitutional right to habeas corpus or Eisenhower’s intervention in Little Rock, Arkansas, look like child’s play?

In the past one-hundred years, when civil society and its institutions around the world have broken down or Marxist revolutionaries have threatened to take control, it has been the armed forces that have traditionally stepped in to restore order and some semblance of (anti-Marxist) normalcy. Thus, General Augusto Pinochet led the Chilean army in a 1973 coup to topple the impending Communist take-over by President Salvador Allende and restore order in that country. And in July 1936 General Francisco Franco led a coalition of traditionalist Carlists, conservatives, and the Church to overthrow the violently anticlerical and Marxist Spanish republic (unfortunately, he did not follow through to establish a traditional monarchy after his coup).

But in America today our armed forces, since at least the Obama years, have been coopted by the political left.  Army top brass now echo the “woke-speak” of Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, accuses former President Trump of fomenting a “Reichstag moment” and compares him to Adolf Hitler, while assisting to implement mandatory Critical Race Theory programs in the armed forces. And Milley is far from being alone, as author Lt. Colonel Matthew Lohmeir has recently documented in his study, Irresistible Revolution: Marxism’s Goal of Conquest & the Unmaking of the American Military. In any major civil conflict, very probably the armed forces would be an instrument of the Deep State.

Where does that leave us? Are we indeed destined to live under a post- or neo-Marxist authoritarian dictatorship that would make the older Soviet Communists envious?

My friend and internationally-recognized political theorist and historian, Paul Gottfried (editor of Chronicles magazine) has speculated on one possible scenario, one possibility that could occur. Revolutionary regimes that come to power often “devour their children,” that is, the various elements that seem to triumph have a falling out and begin to fight among themselves over direction and the spoils. Thus, it was in Republican Spain during the Civil War when the Communists suppressed the large Anarchist component (the FAI) in their revolutionary coalition, imprisoning and executing thousands of them. And who can forget the purges unleashed by Lenin and then by Stalin in the Soviet Union on those dissidents who had earlier supported the Revolution?

Within the dominant Democratic Party and its supporters definable factions exist. Joe Biden attempts to placate them. But the question should be asked: How far will the Establishment Managerial Elite be prepared to go before it must deal with its more recalcitrant elements…or will those elements become dominant and force “woke” corporate America to fully give way and accept in reality as well as in theory their nostrums? Will there be violence on a large scale?

And, following Dr. Gottfried’s model, would there be enough of us to pick up the pieces in such a conflict…and would we be prepared?

When I studied in Spain my doctoral subject was the Spanish traditionalist Carlist philosopher and political leader, Juan Vazquez de Mella. During his lifetime in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, the traditionalist movement he represented and defended both in his writings and verbally in the Spanish parliament (the Cortes) had been essentially sidelined, defeated earlier in three brutal civil wars, wracked by internal division, and reduced to its strongholds in Navarra, parts of Aragon and Catalonia. Surveying the political landscape circa 1920 hardly anyone expressed optimism, practically-speaking, for its rebirth or revitalization.

But Mella viewed events and history in a different manner.  Over his long career he developed a theory of “catastrophism,” which, briefly, suggested that the liberal revolution of the late eighteenth century in thinking and the capitalist revolution of the nineteenth century in economics, would inevitably destroy the older, natural social order. These revolutions would lead inexorably to socialist and Marxist revolutions: to cataclysm, war, and human destruction on a vast and previously unknown scale. After which, those–the remnant—who had continued faithful, who had continued to maintain the Virtue of Hope and a belief in Providence, throughout, would finally triumph. Had it not been so with the early Christians, secreted away in catacombs and at times subject to fierce persecution? Yet, with perseverance and faith they had triumphed.

I am put in mind of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem, “Ulysses,” when Odysseus summons his followers and exhorts them:

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
 
This was President Jefferson Davis’ confidence and hope, as it must assuredly be ours in this modern vale of despair:  “Truth crushed to earth is truth still and like a seed will rise again.”