A friend has recently followed my suggestion that he should read R. H. Benson’s dystopian classic Lord of the World. Having done so, he’s written to me of the prescience with which Benson foresees the rise of the democratic demagogue and the apparent triumph of the secular fundamentalism that he preaches. Here is my response:

 

It is prescient indeed but we must avoid the temptation to despair, which is a grave sin. The Church is continually being declared dead in every generation only to be resurrected in the next. She is always on the brink of collapse (or so it seems) but She never collapses. Empires, countries, ideologies, philosophies, heresies and dominions have passed away but the Church has not passed away. The gates of hell have not prevailed! 

As usual, Chesterton says it best:

“It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect.”