Tea at Trianon: Friends for Eternity

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, April 1, 2023

Friends for Eternity

From LexiCali Blog:

There comes a point in every believer’s life where you realize you are on the right path, the wrong path or have one foot in and one foot out – walking a very dangerous tight rope that could threaten your salvation.

You can’t always help who your friends are. We get lumped in a school, a career, a path that can be rife with the right and wrong people. The more the drumbeat of the world, the harder it is to find like minded women and men to trust or hold you accountable morally. And sometimes we can linger too long with the wrong people because we trust ourselves too much to do a God-thing for those who need it. We can stay too long in jobs because of the money or the status. We can slowly let comprise drip, drip and ultimately overtake us until eventually we are won over to the thing we fought so hard to be above. Better than. A dangerous place of pride that dances with temptation. Someone always loses in that battle.

Being “in the world and not of it” gets harder when things devolve in the world to the degree that they have as we are experiencing now. In today’s world if you actually live as your faith instructs, you might just be a unicorn! It gets harder to stand alone, say no to the crowd and play that corporate game and get the God work done like Jesus under cover. That kind of spiritual chess has an expiration date and eventually a lived, intentional, radical faith will need to take center stage. Talk is cheap. The walk is a bit of a white martyrdom. (Read more.)