What is true of something as simple as a hike through the woods to reach a hidden waterfall or a mountain top, is just as true of greater, more momentous, endeavors. What I want to apply it to is the evolution of human, and humane, society, a hike that all of mankind worldwide has been taking for about seven thousand years, starting from many locations but gradually merging until we find that most of us are now hiking side-by-side, having abandoned alternate trails, sometimes without good cause.
What I mean when I say ‘without good cause’ is that along the way, the native intuitions that have guided us down the right trails, themselves the result of ‘survival of the fittest’ selection, from time to time are overridden by voices of dissent hailing from impatient, dissatisfied minds, that want to stand out, to make a statement, to divert us from the trails that we collectively chose by our intuitions. We listen to them, abandon the right trails, and get off course. We can sense this, but are afraid to turn back.
And turn back we must, if we sense that we have chosen a wrong trail, one that is not going to get us to our destination. Sometimes that wrong trail just dead ends, and we are forced willy-nilly to turn back, our blind guides suddenly absent. Sometimes the trail gets narrower and narrower and we can see that soon it will be no trail at all. This is where the blind guides will use any excuse or ruse to get us to keep groping down that decline. This is also where we have to regain our self-confidence, and turn back.
Turn back to where? If we can retrace our steps, to that place on our original trail where we took the cut. It has turned out to not be a short cut after all, and we have to be honest and admit it, and then go back to the last good trail and give it another try. It brought us to a very good place once. Maybe if we kept on it, we’d be able to reach our destination, which is a very, very good place. This is where we as a race and as a world are right now. We’ve taken the wrong trail and we’re winding up nowhere we want to be.
Politically, we have bought into the premise that democracy is the best form of government that can ever exist, applicable to all levels and scales of society. Monarchy, not the ceremonial kind that we see in about two dozen countries today, but what might be called autocratic monarchy, exists almost nowhere, and where it does exist, it is in attenuated form, and it is non-Christian. Such an autocratic monarchy, not according to Christ who is the True King, is incapable of being the Champion of the people.
For that is what a true monarch is: the Champion, Lord, and Lover of his people, one who is raised from among them, not by wealth or social status, but by wisdom, by courage, by purity of life, by obedience, and by love. The motto of some Scandinavian and Greek kings was ‘The people’s love, my strength,’ but that was an inversion. It should be ‘The people’s strength, my love.’ In other words, the love of the king for his people is their strength, the safeguard of their liberties, as the British Crown still claims.
And of course, to the best of her ability, Her Majesty the Queen at least represents the guardian of the liberties of the British people, but only as an icon of what Parliament decides. Though she was anointed and crowned in conformity with true monarchy, the British ‘constitution’ does not allow her to vocalize anything of a political nature. Her coronation oath can only be symbolic. Still, the British monarchy has most of its elements intact, if only as formulary, and is the only surviving relic of Christian monarchy.
We’ve been going down some wrong trails these past three hundred years, but it has taken this long for us to see where exactly they have been leading us. The dissolute and decadent monarchies that existed when the ‘enlightenment’ began to change our political and social course were in need of correction. They were themselves wanderings off the right trail, but the corrective was to return to the right trail, not to take another trail completely. We still have Christ the King who makes all men kings the right way.
Christianity still has a voice. Christ is still speaking to us. No one can secure our ‘life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness’ better than He whose divine teaching is in the heart of everyone, waiting to be discovered, none better than He who suffered and rose again to establish not only earthly kingdoms but the Kingdom of the Heavens as well. Christ demonstrates what true kingship is, as King of a nation, as king of a family, and as every authority that reigns through love between the great and the small households.
Dark ages don’t always seem dark to the people who live in them, or, dark ages don’t seem dark to those whose abuse of power makes them what they are, but we have been living for some time in a very dark age, an age that has been an interruption of the age of Light, the age of Christ. Thank God we are running out of trail to follow. Maybe at last we’ll turn back and rejoin the right trail, the one that really has no end except the Beginning of all things, the City made without hands. Let’s all at least make a start.
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