"The gods of the New Paganism"

"MEN do not live long without gods; but when the gods of the New Paganism come they will not be merely insufficient, as were the gods of Greece, nor merely false; they will be evil. One might put it in a sentence, and say the New Paganism, foolishly expecting satisfaction, will fall, before it knows where it is, into Satanism."

~ Hilaire Belloc: "Essays of a Catholic" 

Communism

"Under communism we should have all the worst spiritual effects of industrial capitalism extended and emphasized because their tyranny would be universal. . . .When you destroy the family and the sanctity of the individual, when you make war on the tradition of human culture, you are making war on the Image of God. And because you are making war on the Image of God, which is Man, with his human dignity and free will, you find yourself at once at war with God Himself. It is not an accident that communism should produce wholesale massacre, arson, torture, and the destruction of all lovely things. A perverse theory produces perverse acts. The story has been told over and over again but it can never be told too often."

~Hilaire Belloc: The Way Out.

Education

"THE education of a child belongs properly to the parent, and not to the State. The family is prior to the State in right, and this is particularly true of rights over children."

~Hilaire Belloc: Essays of a Catholic

Artwork: Education, 

by Ferdinand Wagner Sr. 

A.D. 1819 – 1881, German

Persecution

"BUT IF I be asked what sign we may look for to show that the advance of the Faith is at hand, I would answer by a word the modern world has forgotten: Persecution. When that shall be at work it will be morning."

~Hilaire Belloc: Survivals and New Arrivals

Printing

"PRINTING diffused true knowledge, but it also diffused (and on a far greater scale) false knowledge and unproved irrational affirmation." 

~Hilaire Belloc: The Crisis of Our Civilization

Nature of the Reformation

"The break-up of united Western Christendom with the coming of the Reformation was by far the most important thing in history since the foundation of the Catholic Church fifteen hundred years before.

"Men of foresight perceived at the time that if catastrophe were allowed to consumate itself, if the revolt were to be successful (and it was successful), our civilization would certainly be imperilled,  and possibly, in the long run, destroyed.

"That indeed is what has happened. Europe with all its culture is now seriously imperilled and stands no small chance of being destroyed by its own internal disruption; and all this is ultimately the fruit of the great religious revolution which began four hundred years ago.

"That being so, the Reformation being of this importance, it ought to form the chief object of historical study in modern times, and its nature should be clearly understood, even if only in outline."

~Hilaire Belloc: Characters of the Reformation, Chap 1. (1936)

Diptych with the Portraits of Luther and his Wife, by CRANACH, Lucas the Elder. Oil on wood; Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.

Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, by CRANACH, Lucas the Younger. Oil and tempera on wood, transferred to canvas,1559; Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt.

The Calvinist Iconoclastic Riot of August 20, 1566, by HOGENBERG, Frans. Copper engraving, 1588; British Museum, London.

Portrait of John Calvin (1509–1564). Oil on panel, c. 1550. (Anonymous)

SAINT THOMAS MORE

"...Saint Thomas More is badly misunderstood; and through misunderstanding him we misunderstand the nature of the English Reformation itself as well as the peculiar and individual greatness of this individual martyr. . .

"He was, I repeat, utterly alone. He had no support from without.

"And what support had he from within? That terrible question we cannot answer with certitude, but we can, I think, with probability. His was not only a skeptical mind, as has been the mind of more than one who has nonetheless suffered death for truth held by faith and not by experience: it was also a mind which had long practice of seeing both sides of any question and thinking anything can be argued; on that particular point of the Papacy he had himself argued sincerely enough on the wrong side. I suggest that the Martyr in his last moments had all the intellectual frailty of the intellectuals, and that at the end his skepticism was still working; but his glorious resolution stood─and that is the kernel of the affair. He had what is called "Heroic Faith"."

~Hilaire Belloc: Characters of the Reformation, Chap. 6.

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