Thursday, September 15, 2011

Elegiac eloquence

A commentor at another site gives this quote from Ronald Knox, famous 20th century English priest and translator, by himself, of the Bible into sonorous language. Here he ruminates on the hatred that the contemporary enlightened English had for the Catholics. It serves similarly for the hatred so many liberals have for their own Western culture:

…Anyone that will be absolute over a point of doctrine shall find himself a stranger here. And we above all, that will stick to the old religion, shall have no part with you. We shall be marked down for hatred; why, I know not, unless it be that men hate more where they have done wrong than where they have suffered it, as the philosopher says that he confers a benefit is afterward move loving than he who hath received it. It will not be aught we have done to you, whether the burnings in Queen Mary’s time or the plottings, if there be any, at the present, that will be food for your hatred; it will be as when a man loathes the sight of the mistress he hath cast off, you will wish us dead because we disturb you with a memory of what once you were… You in Oxford will be slow to strike in with new fashions, but evermore, though at a distance, you will follow them, and the old things will not return.


No comments:

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...