So I just settled down for a quiet fiction read: HYPATIA by Charles

Kingsley — a good historical yarn by a master of the high Victorian

all-stops-out melodramatic style, for which I have a weakness. Then a call

came in from the town library. A book I’d ordered had come in: James

Walsh’s 1907 semi-classic THE THIRTEENTH: GREATEST OF CENTURIES.

So down to the library I went & picked up the book. There in the proem is a

quote from… Charles Kingsley!

And they talk about Intelligent design….

(Incidentally, the edition the library got for me is a 1952 reprint with a

fine thundering foreword by someone named D.B. Zema, S.J. It is the best

bit of reactionary bombast I have had the pleasure to read since Michael

Wharton left the Daily Telegraph’s “Peter Simple” column. It would, in

fact, do very nicely as a lead editorial in Wharton’s (imaginary) favorite

newspaper, The Feudal Times and Reactionary Herald. Sample: “Happy

indeed would the world have been if the ideals, principles, and achievements

which Dr. Walsh so sympathetically describes in his Thirteenth: Greatest of Centuries, had been allowed to bear full fruit in a thoroughly Christian

civilization and culture. Most unhappily the world took a wrong turn in the

road. The secularist Renaissance of the fifteenth century threw weak man on

his own feeble resources; the Protestant revolt of the sixteenth, divided

his soul; the Rationalism of the eighteenth, blinded it; the Liberalism and

Naturalism of the nineteenth sold it to the sinister powers of matter,

greedy commercialism, base pleasure, and passion, and now, by a historical

consequence, the twentieth reaps a harvest of dragons amid the nightmare of

a barbarous and universal war…” Whew! Never mind standing athwart

history crying “Stop!” This dude wants to blow up the tracks.)