Strangers and Sojourners: v. 1 (Children of the Last Days) by Michael O'Brien

Author:Michael O'Brien [O'Brien, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
ISBN: 9780898709230
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-06-04T06:00:00+00:00

18

The power of her insights, though more prosaic than the mountain visions of her husband and son, could induce a trembling in the nervous system of Anne Delaney. The thought of Joseph Stalin or Adolph Hitler would do it. Or Chamberlain, or Mackenzie King. Or Belfast Realty and its speculations—for Jonah MacPhale had developed new appetites—buying and foreclosing on discouraged homesteaders, stuffing farms, tree-lots, and hotels into his never-satisfied mouth. Oh, there were any number of things she could fight.

Dan Cox, her editor, was more at ease railing against the price of timber than the rumblings of dictators. Over the years he had bought down from a feisty paper on the coast through a succession of small-town ventures to this final sheet, the woodsy Echo, in which he desired to live out his last days printing proclamations of birth, natural death, and church socials. It was a stubborn contrary streak in him, however, that permitted the inclusion of a lone warrior on his team, the unexplainable Mrs. Delaney. He was forced to warn her from time to time that her text was almost unreadable when she plunged beneath the surface account of events, her handling of the issues too subtle or complex for the average reader.

“Get rid of her, Dan”, he had been warned a hundred times. “She’s just spoilin’ yer paper.”

“Nobody loves a critic”, he said to himself, and resolved not to lose her. She added precisely the right amount of controversy to the paper and a certain interest to his rather dull semi-retirement. Besides, he reminded himself, she was always so damn right about things.

Yes, there will be a war. It will be more devastating than the last one, and more terrible in its disdain for life than the atrocities now being experienced by the people of Spain.

How can there not be a war? Can we keep feeding the totalitarian beast small pieces of the free world and expect it to refrain from gobbling us whole one day? This, surely, is the slow, painful, and fatal method, as Mr. Chamberlain shall certainly discover.

Of twenty-seven European nations, only ten remain democratic in the sense that political groups are truly able to compete for public office and their citizens free to pursue life much as they please. The promise of the 1920s that constitutional democracies would flourish has been broken, and the average man, finding himself no longer a citizen but a cell in a vast organism, must pay the penalty.

The very idea of truth has boiled away in the political rhetoric, and this is only the logical outcome of a philosophy that is violent and pagan. The theoreticians of the new social order have declared thought and art to be the flabby activities of a pampered elite and attempt to replace it with a juvenile worship of the body and power.

It is only natural that the religious institutions should be experiencing such universal persecution. The treatment of European Jewry is an obvious example. In addition, the new despots are not only anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, and anticlerical, they are explicitly anti-Christian.

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