A Rewrite of the same

It was the Classical Symphony. That symphony has about it all those graces that render music the thing salvageable from that eighteenth century of time: that time of augmented wealth and diminished happiness, of coarseness in art and in life, an age that began but a few short years after Islam was finally - it had threatened us for full a thousand years - thrust out of the gates of Western Europe on that memorable date, the 11th of September, sixteen hundred and eighty-three, one of the most important in all history, to rise once more in our own day with vengeance; and an age which concluded with a hecatomb to implacable Thanatos; an age when our skies began to choke us with smoke and with fog; when men, especially in England, lost all grasp of spiritual realities, and, lost as in a desert, wandered listlessly, only to find themselves enwrapped in the one or the other of the inevitable concomitants of faithless ages (so familiar!), supersition and rationalism (that most irrational of "isms"); that age of such false philosophies as those of Kant and Hume (what would Aristotle have made of Hume!); the age of the furious Gibbon, blind copier of the scoffing Voltaire; an age of ill-health in body and in soul; an age, finally, of all manner of vice, excess, and perversion: in short, an age so like our own that it is no wonder we continue to call it by that most ironic Kantian name: Enlightenment.