A More Familiar Beginning

Home in the Woods 1847

Per Scriptum,
E. W. Reynolds

Some of you, my readers, may wonder why I have taken and am taking some effort in launching a whole new blog after the success of Landmarks of Liberty. Simply put, Landmarks was owned by the Mackinac Center, and company policy restricted me on conversing in my true Christian voice. And so, what I had wrote in "types and shadows" before, I wish to unveil in its true Theological context.

Now as to title, I was somewhat cornered when I could not seem to come up with a grander title that linked Christian Western heritage with its visible cultural manifestations than Landmarks of Liberty, so I thought smaller. What I believe was missing from Landmarks was the pastoral use of place and memory so true of Western heritage. Quite often the small things of home in this life bring more solid satisfaction than the faddy trinkets of the world, and the big achievements of liberty in the history of the Western world are most keenly preserved when enjoyed in peace. The Victorians elevated the pastoral to the level of ideology through Romanticism, and while I see much practical good from the homely and well ordered priorities of the Victorian middle class, I also see the harm in toying with ideology. Pastoralism was just one more of the many isms of the nineteenth century (like imperialism on the other extreme) which distracted the West from giving glory to God the Father, the King of the nations, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost.

However, I say again, that homely living, not the vulgarity of repetition, but rather the true domestic virtues, in moderation and quietness suites the scholar attempting to understand the movement of this world and its inhabitants. As George Eliot wrote in Daniel Deronda:

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and--kindly acquaintance with all neighbors, even to the dogs and donkeys... The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

As I enter ever widening circles of knowledge, I must have familiarity. And so, I start out again gazing ever upward into the constellations of Western commonwealths, from my own little corner of the world; the domestic crossings of fellow travelers like myself. The great works of nation builders throughout the centuries have done likewise, and the most sincerest expression of Christian Western glory dwells more with the little country lane than in the halls of the state.