Cult of Inevitability

In the eighteenth century the self-appointed philosophes discovered that religion is a “barrier athwart Man’s road to Freedom,” and confidently predicted that the “inevitable course of history” would abolish Christianity by 1800 or 1850. Although the course of history proved once again that, as Hilaire Belloc put it, “men prophesy and the future makes fools of them” the vendors of pseudo-intellectual revelation are still doing business at the old stands.

Noisy prophets now assure you that the “inevitable course of history” leads to international socialism, and exhort you to accommodate yourself to a “changing world” in which the only thing that will not change is the direction of social change. But since Christianity is undeniably still with us, the more wary practitioners coincidence between what History makes inevitable and what the “true Christian” must desiderate.

RO

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Revilo Oliver

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In the eighteenth century the self-appointed philosophes discovered that religion is a “barrier athwart Man’s road to Freedom,” and confidently predicted that the “inevitable course of history” would abolish Christianity by 1800 or 1850. Although the course of history proved once again that, as Hilaire Belloc put it, “men prophesy and the future makes fools of them” the vendors of pseudo-intellectual revelation are still doing business at the old stands.

Noisy prophets now assure you that the “inevitable course of history” leads to international socialism, and exhort you to accommodate yourself to a “changing world” in which the only thing that will not change is the direction of social change. But since Christianity is undeniably still with us, the more wary practitioners coincidence between what History makes inevitable and what the “true Christian” must desiderate.