When Christian Leaders Were Men

Oh that the Lord Christ would again raise up such a leader today

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Speech of Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos

Constantine XI was the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire. He fought to defend his empire, his people, and his religion from the invading Turks. Constantine led the Byzantine forces himself during the Fall of Constantinople. He died, as a soldier, on the battlefield on 29 May 1453 at the hands of the Turks, and Constantinople has been lost ever since. This was his final speech he delivered to his men before his death:

“Gentlemen, illustrious captains of the army, and our most Christian comrades in arms: we now see the hour of battle approaching. I have therefore elected to assemble you here to make it clear that you must stand together with firmer resolution than ever. You have always fought with glory against the enemies of Christ. Now the defence of your fatherland and of the city known the world over, which the infidel and evil Turks have been besieging for two and fifty days, is committed to your lofty spirits.

Be not afraid because its walls have been worn down by the enemy’s battering. For your strength lies in the protection of God and you must show it with your arms quivering and your swords brandished against the enemy. I know that this undisciplined mob will, as is their custom, rush upon you with loud cries and ceaseless volleys of arrows. These will do you no bodily harm, for I see that you are well covered in armour. They will strike the walls, our breastplates, and our shields. So do not imitate the Romans who, when the Carthaginians went into battle against them, allowed their cavalry to be terrified by the fearsome sight and sound of elephants.

In this battle, you must stand firm and have no fear, no thought of flight, but be inspired to resist with ever more herculean strength. Animals may run away from animals. But you are men, men of stout heart, and you will hold at bay these dumb brutes, thrusting your spears and swords into them, so that they will know that they are fighting not against their own kind but against the masters of animals.

You are aware that the impious and infidel enemy has disturbed the peace unjustly. He has violated the oath and treaty that he made with us; he has slaughtered our farmers at harvest time; he has erected a fortress on the Propontis as it were to devour the Christians; he has encircled Galata under a pretence of peace.

Now he threatens to capture the city of Constantine the Great, your fatherland, the place of ready refuge for all Christians, the guardian of all Greeks, and to profane its holy shrines of God by turning them into stables for fits horses. Oh, my lords, my brothers, my sons, the everlasting honour of Christians is in your hands.

You men of Genoa, men of courage and famous for your infinite victories, you who have always protected this city, your mother, in many a conflict with the Turks, show now your prowess and your aggressive spirit toward them with manly vigour.

You men of Venice, most valiant heroes, whose swords have many a time made Turkish blood to flow and who in our time have sent so many ships, so many infidel souls to the depths under the command of Loredano, the most excellent captain of our fleet, you who have adorned this city as if it were your own with fine, outstanding men, lift high your spirits now for battle.

You, my comrades in arms, obey the commands of your leaders in the knowledge that this is the day of your glory — a day on which, if you shed but a drop of blood, you will win for yourselves crowns of martyrdom and eternal fame.”

Constantine XI Palaiologos
Last Emperor of the Byzantine Empire

Wright on Ethnic Realities

“When the white population falls below the 50% mark, the days of whites running interference for blacks will be over. And so will those special laws biased towards safeguarding perquisites for the ‘Disadvantaged,’ which can be mighty expensive to enforce.

Again, what are the odds that those 18th-century injunctions devised by those funny little men in britches and waistcoats will prevail, once the polyglot new Americans from Asia and Central and South America begin to flex their political muscle?

So many blacks and their white liberal gurus failed to appreciate those Anglo-originated laws based on ‘self-evident truths’ and the consent of the governed, which were flexible enough to take under their protection the nation’s former slaves. Who will there be to ensure that jobs and scholarships and government contracts, and the surfeit of other entitlements, will be available for a people who have grown used to looking to others for slices from the economic pie, instead of baking their own share of it?

Once what’s left of constitutional law is gone, partly out of neglect, because the story of the Constitution and its creators will no longer be taught in the various Chinese-Indian-Latino-Arab colored school systems, a new corner will be turned. If blacks think they’ve been mistreated at the hands of whites, just wait until the affirmative action, set aside party is over–when there is no one to insist that they get undeserved perks, or have a ‘right’ to intrude themselves into places where they are not wanted.

The new dominant ethnics come to this land with their own sob stories of oppression. Unlike whites, they are hardly likely to fall over one another to apologize for past wrongs. Nor are they likely to spend their time in Congress concocting new laws designed to discriminate against their own sons and daughters in favor of blacks.

‘Reparations,’ did you say? Just wait until the first move is made to un-name and re-name some of those Martin Luther King, Jr. boulevards.”

Elizabeth Wright
Black essayist and social critic

 

1st John’s Indicators Concerning The Holy Spirit

In his first Epistle St. John gives three indicators that we have the Spirit and so abide in Him and He in us. The first is that we keep the commandments of Jesus. The second is that we confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh. The third is that we “love one another.”

Notice there is nothing there about the charismatic gifts.  Notice there is nothing there about the subjective inward look for the Spirit’s footprints that so many Pietists love. Really, the inward look, to one who is sensitive to God’s absolute standard of perfection is a recipe for despair. “I know that in me no good thing dwells.”

Note also how the Westminster Confession corresponds so well with St. John when it talks about the necessity of deed, word, and thought; or if you prefer, action, belief, attitude.

Keep in mind here that love (in the necessity to “Love one another”) can only be identified and defined by God’s law. The appeal here isn’t to a warm fuzzy feeling. The appeal here is to love as a verb… love shows action and the action it shows is treating our neighbors consistent with God’s revelation of Himself in his law.

Familialism and Folk Sayings

Often the wisdom of a long-standing truth is contained in our aphorisms, proverbs, and apothegms. Here is a brief primer on the long-standing truth of familialism (a love of, and so a proper prioritizing of one’s own kith and kin) as seen by the legacy of folk wisdom.

Our current mad rush towards egalitarianism and culture marxism overturns all this long and storied wisdom handed down by the centuries. With our rush to embrace multiculturalism, multifaithism, and multiracialism, we are cutting ourselves off from the wisdom of generations and generations of Christian forebears who have gone before us. With the embrace of cultural Marxism, with its egalitarian emphasis, we are violating a maxim taught to us by G. K. Chesterton that we should never take a fence down until we know why it was there.

Some of these are more obvious than others. Others will require you to pause and think of just a moment as to how they overturn the current trend of Alienism found among our cultural gatekeepers.

 

1.) Blood is thicker than water.
2.) The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
3.) A leopard cannot change its spots.
4.) Birds of a feather flock together.
5.) Bloom where you’re planted.
6.) You aren’t required to set yourself on fire to keep others warm.
7.) The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful.
8.) The same law for both the lion and ox is oppression.
9.) You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, yet she will hurry back.
10.) Good fences make good neighbors.
11.) Every tub sits on its own bottom.
12.) They that lay down with dogs get up with fleas.
13.) A lamb adopted by a wolf pack will never be the alpha.
14.) Home is where you go when you have no place else to go.
15.) A house divided against itself cannot stand.
16.) Be it ever so humble, there is no place like home.
17.) Charity begins at home.
18.) Children are a poor man’s riches.
19.) Like Father, like son.
20.) An ounce of blood is worth more than a pound of friendship.
21.) Our ancestors dwell in the attics of our brains as they do in the spiraling chains of knowledge hidden in every cell of our bodies.
22.) Just because a cat has her kittens in the oven that doesn’t make them biscuits.

Hat Tip — Mickey Henry, Ehud Would, Matthew Lee, Colby Malsbury 

 

Enemies From Within; The ‘Evangelical Judenrat’

“A man’s enemies will be the members of his own household.” Mt. 10:36

“A nation can survive its fools and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.”
 
 Marcus Tullius Cicero

In the film “Braveheart,” William Wallace comes to the point that he must kill the Scottish Lords as well as the English Lords because the two are in bed together and victory over the English will not be had unless the Scottish Lords beholden to the English are killed as well. The Scottish Lords were a fifth column that had to be eliminated.

While reading of Vespasian’s and Titus’ siege of Jerusalem one learns that the Zealots (Nationalists) busied themselves assassinating the Priestly class because the Priestly class was in bed with the Romans. Indeed the Priestly aristocratic class even attempted to open the Jerusalem gates for the Roman army. The Zealots, in their attempt to free Jerusalem from Rome, had to kill the Jewish priestly class as well as Romans.

In WW II the Judenrat, according to Hannah Arendt in her book on Adolph Eichman, assisted the Germans in controlling the Jews.

“To a Jew, this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story. […] In the matter of cooperation, there was no distinction between the highly assimilated Jewish communities of Central and Western Europe and the Yiddish-speaking masses of the East. In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property…”

If one is familiar with Literature that deals with the Ghettos in the WW II era this is a constant theme.

In light of all this, it should not be surprising that the greatest threat to the Church does not come from without the Church. The greatest threat comes from with the Church as from the Wormtongues and the Kim Philbys.  These are the modern Judenrat which are doing the work of the enemy by controlling the Church from within.