Tea at Trianon: Playtime for the Atheist

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, February 26, 2022

Playtime for the Atheist

From Dr. Esolen at Crisis:

When you see a man, you see—whether you are aware of it or not, whether you consider it or not, and whether it pleases you or not—a person fashioned to be, in his mode of physical existence and also, as we believe, his spiritual existence, a father. He bears within him the seed of new human life. You see the woman, and in the same way, regardless of the same things, you see a mother, the field, the nurturing soil whence the new life will spring. These are truths. From them, and from the nature of the human child, we can deduce the whole of the moral law regarding sexual action.

It should be a joy for us to do so. We should revel in it. That we do not revel in the moral law implies not that there is something defective in it, but that there is something defective in us.

Imagine someone going to a place of tremendous and sublime beauty—to Angel Falls, to the Grand Canyon, to the foothills of Mount Fuji. Imagine that he is quite unmoved by it, perhaps bored, or even irritated. We would not lay the blame on Angel Falls. We would lay the blame on him. (Read more.)