Longfellow & The Bells He Heard On Christmas Day

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a New Englander and an ardent abolitionist. In 1863 he wrote the poem “I heard the bells on Christmas Day,” and later it was put to a tune. That tune is often song in Churches during this time of year, but keep in mind that when Longfellow says,

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
“God is not dead, nor doth He sleep;
The Wrong shall fail,
The Right prevail,
With peace on earth, good-will to men.”

That what Longfellow has in mind as “Wrong” is the Biblical Christianity of the South and what he has in his mind as “Right prevailing” is the Jacobin anti-Christianity of the Northern Yankees.

Further, there are stanzas of Longfellow’s poem that don’t find their way into most Christian hymn books. For example,

Then from each black, accursed mouth

The cannon thundered in the South,
And with the sound
The carols drowned
Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

It was as if an earthquake rent

The hearth-stones of a continent,
And made forlorn
The households born

Of peace on earth, good-will to men!

So, Longfellow doesn’t give us a Christmas Carol so much as he gives us Jacobin agitprop. Per Longfellow, the South is responsible for breaking the peace on earth and goodwill to men. This is the opposite of the truth. Per Longfellow, it is the South’s fault that Northern homes are forlorn.

Longfellow doubtless writes this because his son Charlie was significantly wounded once, while a separate time Charlie returned home having contracted a serious fever while at the front.

What we sing, abstracted from the back story is fine but when we know the back story this Christmas Carol is almost as bad as Julia Ward Howe’s “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” while sanctifying the wicked war effort as much as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” did.

Personally, I’d rather not sing this Jacobin agitprop at Christmas. I hate the cause of the Jacobin Yankees in their work at destroying the last great Christian civilization. I loathe the Lincoln-worshipers with their strained and attenuated understanding of US history.

Of course, you can find a Gospel Coalition article praising the song.

Dempster on Jacob’s Wrestling with God

Two birth scenes frame Jacob’s life: the struggle with Esau in the darkness of the womb, when he is born Jacob (Gen. 25:22-23), and the struggle with God in the darkness at the Jabbok river, when he is reborn Israel (Gen. 32:25-33). Similarly, two nocturnal divine encounters shape his life: the dream at Bethel (Gen. 28:10-22) and the struggle at Jabbok….

Just as Abram became a new man when he was circumcised and consequently renamed ‘father of many nations’, so Jacob becomes born again as ‘Israel’ after being crippled in a desperate struggle with a divine assailant (Gen. 32:25-30). As Geller remarks, this passage is extremely significant: ‘the eponymous ancestor of the nation is about to receive a national name.’ In what amounts to a second-birth experience, he fights in the darkness not with his brother (in the womb) but with God. He wins the fight by losing – by being broken – and facing up to his identity (Jacob – Deceiver). Consequently, he tells God who he is (Jacob the deceiver, the heel grabber) and has his name changed to Israel (God’s fighter). Jacob wins the blessing and will be God’s conquering warrior on earth. But he does not emerge unscathed; he is now lame, wounded in the thigh (Gen. 32:26, 33) – the place from which the descendants will come (Gen. 46:26, Ex. 1:5). Jacob has been circumcised in his spirit.

Stephen Dempster
Dominion and Dynasty — p. 87-88

From Every Tribe, Tongue & Nation

7 John said to the crowds coming out to be baptized by him, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the coming wrath? 8 Produce fruit in keeping with repentance. And do not begin to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our father.’ For I tell you that out of these stones God can raise up children for Abraham.

John the Baptist comes pronouncing prophetic warning and woe. One matter he attacks is the Jewish mindset that believes it is special unto God just because it is Jewish. John ends all that nonsense by pulling the props from just that mindset. The Father does not love people solely upon the basis of their ethnicity or race. When the Father loves someone He loves them upon the basis of their identity in Christ.

Now, none of this is to say that having Abraham as their Father was unimportant or insignificant completely. St. Paul himself can later say in speaking of the descendants of Abraham, “Theirs is the adoption to sonship; theirs the divine glory, the covenants, the receiving of the law, the temple worship and the promises.” Paul speaks here of the great privilege of being Jewish. But what Israel had done is they had absolutized their biological ethnicity marker and said that nothing else mattered. John the Baptist informs this that such thinking is the thinking of a fool. It matters not what your lineage is if you do not look to the greater one that John is Heralding and if you do not bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance.
Being part of the covenant community is a great privilege but if you absolutize that membership in such a way that all one is resting in is biological connectedness you are lost.

This tendency to absolutize ethnicity as a marker of God’s automatic favor is not unique to Jews. People groups have done it repeatedly. As just one example in recent history is the Black Liberation Theologian James Cone who has written,

“Therefore, God’s Word of recon­ciliation means that we can only be justified by becoming black. Reconciliation makes us all black. Through this radical change, we become identified totally with the suffering of the black masses. It is this fact that makes all-white churches anti-Christian in their essence. To be Christian is to be one of those whom God has chosen. God has chosen black people!”

“Black Theology and Black Power” by James H. Cone (1969) — pg. 151

This kind of specious thinking goes on among White people as well,
Bertrand Comparet, writing in the American Institute of Theology’s “Bible Correspondence Course,” observes:

“Of course, one of the purposes [in Christ’s coming] was to pay the penalty of the sins of every person who believes and accepts Him as his personal Savior. But this is not all: another purpose of His first coming was to redeem His people ISRAEL which we know are not and never were composed of Jews; but today they are known as the Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, and Germanic nations.”

This is a strange quote because it seems to draw a distinction between Christ coming to offer salvation to all while only redeeming white people. Regardless, of its strangeness it is suggesting that ethnic markers limit who can be redeemed.

We see in both these quotes is the same thing here that John the Baptist was warning against in his preaching to the Jews in Luke 3. We see here an absolutizing of ethnic markers so that nothing else matters besides ethnicity.

That is something we must warn against and be on guard against. Our hope, in terms of our salvation, must not rest in ethnic markers, though we can and should thank God for those markers and understand what a great blessing they are. Our hope is anchored in being properly related to the Lord Christ who saves men from every tribe, tongue, and nation, in their tribes, tongues, and nations.

Sanger & Holmes Jr. on Forced Sterilization

“When we realize that each feeble-minded person is a potential source of endless progeny of defect, we prefer the policy of immediate sterilization, of making sure that parenthood is absolutely prohibited to the feeble-minded.”

Margaret Sanger

“We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, in order to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. . . . Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”

Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
Supreme Court Justice — US Supreme Court
Buck vs. these united States
Holmes’ Opinion that Buck should be forcefully sterilized

This is what the person outside of Christ calls compassion. Compassion to the non-Christian who is consistent with their Christ-hating presuppositions is tyranny and control. Sanger and Holmes Jr. would have been very comfortable with the tyranny we are seeing today. This class of people always believes themselves to be the enlightened benighted. They believe that they know what is best for the hoi-polloi. They will take it upon themselves to rule those who they deem are not able to rule themselves. They completely ignore other jurisdictions like family and/or church that God has ordained to have jurisdiction over areas they may not touch. For people like Sanger and Holmes Jr. a top-down federal bureaucracy is to be in charge over all and is to decide all questions and all must bow to their infinite wisdom.

Our Forebears Called Them “Savages” For A Reason

Behold the peaceful culture of the American Indian.

I.) Schmidt Account

“Given that human sacrificing and scalping was part of American Indian culture, but not mentioned in Government school textbooks, it is not surprising that the cannibalism that was also present in many tribes likewise is not mentioned. A little-known fact is that the Mohawk tribe derived its name from its habit of eating human flesh. Alpheus Hyatt Verill writes: ‘ The Mohawks were notorious eaters of human flesh, and were called Mohowauock or man-eaters by the Narragansetts. William Warren, a native of the Chippewas, noted in his History of the Ojibways (1852) that his people occasionally ate human flesh. In 1853 John Palliser wrote that the Sioux and Minitares had their women cut pieces of human flesh from slain enemy warriors. These pieces were then broiled and eaten. Eskimos, especially during times of stress, also consumed human flesh. The Pawnees would roast their prisoners for food. The French explorer, La Sale, reported that they encountered an instance in which the slaves of Indians were forced to eat their own.

In the 1670’s Father Chrestien Le Clercq described some Iroquois cruelties that often including forcing prisoners to eat their own flesh. The Roman Emperors, Diocletian and Nero, the two savage persecutors of the early Christians, ‘would hold in horror the vengeance, the tortures, and the cruelty of the Indians of New France [Quebec], and above all the Iroquois, towards their prisoners. Le Clercq noted that the Iroquois cut off the prisoners’ fingers, burned them with firebrands, tore away their nails, and made ‘them eat their own flesh.'”

The Menace of Multiculturalism

Alvin J. Schmidt — pg. 48

II.) Hoskins Account

The following is excerpted from Vigilantes of Christendom: The History of the Phineas Priesthood, by Richard Kelly Hoskins (1990, The Virginia Publishing Company of Lynchburg, Lynchburg, VA 24505; pp. 65-67)

Chapter 3: Virginia

“Shortly after the settlement at Jamestown in 1607, a ship from England was sailing up the James River to Jamestown Island bringing settlers and supplies.

The passengers and crew observed a canoe, which was being frantically paddled by an Indian woman and seven children, emerging from behind a point of land. Behind the canoe was a ship’s boat, manned by husky White men who were just as furiously rowing their craft… which was steadily gaining.

The ship’s boat caught up with the canoe almost under the bow of the ship, and the interested passengers and crew gasped as a sailor in the bow of the ship’s boat leaned over and with his pistol shot the Indian woman. The ship’s boat rammed the fragile canoe and rode up over it, forcing it down into the water and throwing the children into the river. They watched in horror as the sailors used their oars to hold the children under water until they drowned.

The incoming ship landed at Jamestown and its passengers disembarked, full of protests and condemnation at the brutal sight they had just witnessed. Then they were told the rest of the story.

The Indians’ god was named Okee, or Kiwassa. He was a mighty and terrible god, a god the Indians feared. He spoke to the Indians in thunder and lightning. Night, blackness, and pain bespoke his presence.

His food was pain. The more the pain, the longer and more excruciating the pain, the more satisfied and happy was Okee. To turn this consuming wrath from themselves, the Indians did all they could to give their god what he wanted – pain- from someone else.

As to a “good” god, there was no such being. If there were, there was no reason to worship or conciliate such a deity, since he would not injure them. This Okee was another matter entirely. He had to be pacified or he would turn on the Indian for the pain he craved.

Once a year, twenty of the most handsome children, aged 10 to 15, were painted white and placed at the foot of a tree. Then, savages armed with clubs formed a narrow corridor through which five men were to pass, carrying off the children. As the braves passed through the corridor with the children in their arms, they were severely beaten by the multitude to elicit pain, but the carriers carefully shielded the children. The childrens’ turn was to come. The children were then cast into a heap in a valley. The actual things that were done to the children were well-kept secrets, but this much we do know: Okee sucked their blood until they were dead. The god Okee loved pain and sucked blood

[Virginia, John Esten Cooke, New York, 1883, p. 28].

The pain of someone good was better than the pain of someone bad; that of the strong and brave better than that of one weak. But pain of any sort was demanded. Indian women and children were the ones delegated to administer this pain. Their craft was state-of-the-art. They were past experts at their allotted tasks.

The pain of a White man was, in the eyes of the Indians, better than the pain of an Indian. Therefore, every White settler was eyed as a potential gift to Okee. When fate, trust, cupidity, or stupidity delivered a White captive into Indian hands, he was imprisoned but treated with kindness and was well cared for. He was carefully fed to build his strength to withstand the trials to come.

When at last judged to be in his strongest physical condition, he was taken to meet Okee. He was bound, usually to a stake in the center of an Indian village. The Indian women and children were released to practice their carefully-learned craft on him. They were masters at their work.

The skin on the prisoner’s face, eyelids, lips, tongue, and private parts were slowly and excruciatingly removed. Splinters the size of toothpicks were inserted into the bare muscle tissue and lighted. With care and patience, a White man could be kept alive sometimes for three excruciating days. Then his entrails, those that would not cause immediate death, were removed.

On rare occasions when tortured prisoners were recaptured while undergoing torture, they always begged for a quick and merciful death – never for release. What was left of the man was a ragged screaming bundle of scorched and burnt nerves and flesh – the perfect meal that satisfied Okee best.

The Indian woman and her children executed under the bow of the incoming ship below Jamestown Island had been surprised torturing a White captive in the manner described above. They fled by boat, were caught, and were given a quick, merciful death.. something they had not given their victim.

The passengers and crew quickly came to understand that Indians were not sunburned, White men. They were savages bred to their way of life for a thousand generations by a god that demanded that different laws be obeyed. The colonists made quick adjustments in their thinking to improve their chances of survival in a strange land, a land made savage by inhabitants as cruel and evil as anything encountered by the children of Israel when they went into the promised land.

The men in the longboat acted as Phineas [Numbers 25:1-12] would have acted.”

End Quote

I’m thinking that someone has resurrected Okee and that we are offering our aborted children to the Masochistic God named Okee who delights in the pain of the most judicially innocent.

I’m also thinking that it would have been the cruelest compassion possible to the living Jamestown settlers to show compassion to those who were caught skinning people alive and torturing them by the cruelest means.

Finally, I’m thinking that not all cultures are equal. Faith in Okee drove a culture that was just as vile and sadistic as the God they served. When people serve false gods they build raw, horrific, and pain-inducing culture. Bad theology hurts people. The best thing that a Christian can do is;

1.) Give these people the Gospel

2.) Quarantine the pagan faith system and culture from their own culture.

There is no compassion in populating your country with pagan faith systems that drive base and cruel culture.

Next time someone wants to tell you about the evil culture of the white man you might want to recite the above. Our Forbears called them “savages” for a reason.