The Decline of Reverence

C. S. Lewis was right when he said "Deny the Spirit food, and it will feed on poison".
Our modern age has seen a shocking decline in the virtue of Reverence, otherwise known as respect, or in a classical sense, pietas. We have lost the sense that we pass through the earth, and leave it to our children as we have received it from our parents. We think that, rather than holding a sacred trust from our ancestors which it is our duty to maintain, and our delight to augment with greater glory for "The honour of God, our own credit and as a return for the pain of our fathers", we own the earth. We own our institutions and may alter them at will, with little or no thought for those who have entrusted them to us.

The holy band of marriage, hallowed by millennia of tradition, has fallen under the scythe of the innovators, and with it the family life which is bound inside it.

The Holy Church which is our duty to God, and the glory of the earth, has fallen before Foucault, Nietchze and modernity. May our fallen and broken mother rise from under the feet of the Jacobins.

The Courts of Justice, in which true Justice with Mercy has been executed for centuries, so as to make "British Justice" a byword for equity, has succumbed to faddishness and corruption.

Her Gracious Majesty our Queen, Mater Patriae, is under threat - The godly Prince threatened by the godless. Why? So that we can pretend we know better than our fathers. So we can have power unrestrained, irreverence unchecked, modernity untrammeled. Paine put it this way: "Man has no property in man, nor has any generation property in those which follow". He trusts in the competence of this generation. He is supremely irreverent, like his modern descendants.

This generation fears nothing. Not God, not Justice, not the King, and has no reverence. Not for parents, the old, women, children, the weak, or the dead. A British school the other week had to be spoken to sharply for jeering at a passing funeral. No-one told them how to behave at one. They had never entered Church. I pulled a young lout up by the collar on the bus the other day, in order to allow an infirm 80 year old a chair. No-one had ever suggested he move before.

Our society lacks reverence for that which deserves Respect. Wi Huata, husband of former MP Donna Awatere-Huata, was in Court with his wife yesterday. He was charged with fraud. He stood in the dock, before the Justice, and read the paper. No fear. (I cannot help wondering if there is a link between this failure to reverence Justice, and the removal of large amounts of the transcendant ceremony which go with it, such as the removal of wigs, and the restriction of bowing). Deny us food, we will take poison. Humans are programmed to reverence. Deny us family, Queen, Country, and our God, and we will reverence psychics, corrupt politicians, millionaires, gangsta rappers, film stars, gang members. Disconnected from Burke's general bank and capital of tradition and identity, we are set to trade on the dregs gathered from this generation, its competence, disconnection and anarchy.

We take our stand in a flood of filth, against a tide of evil. Our noble rebellion must succeed. My namesake, William Pitt the Younger, addressed the House of Commons in 1783:

Let us examine and strengthen what is left. The misfortunes of individuals and nations opened to wise counsel are more than half redressed. Let us feel our calamities. Let us bear them too, like men.

Like Horatius, the ashes of our fathers, and the temples of the gods are under threat.

Who will stand on either hand and keep the bridge with me?

Pitt the Younger (originally posted here)