Today is, here, the Memorial of the Forty English Martyrs. I went to Mass this morning; unsurprisingly, the priest gave a tiresomely ecumenical homily about the brotherhood of Protestants and Catholics, thereby entirely missing the point of the Memorial.

I have worked on an essay today; I quote what I think is a rather fine passage from my as yet unfinished essay:

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 seventeen years after Islam was after nearly a thousand years finally thrust out of the gates of Europe on that memorable date, September 11, 1683, one of the most important in all history, to rise once more in our own day, and an age which concluded in the sacrilegious horrors of the French Revolution, and the sacrifices thereof to Death’s dark demon; an age when a succession of German puppet kings were placed on the throne of England after the legitimate Stuart kings had been ousted and replaced, tragically, with a comical little Dutch adulterous perverted vicious heretical murderous massacring usurper, after this country had been invaded by Dutch mercenaries; an age when the ancient traditions of Christendom all but broke down, and when our skies began to choke us with smoke and fog, when men lost all mental grasp of spiritual realities, especially in England, and, lost, wandered listlessly to find themselves enwrapped in superstition, or in rationalism (that most irrational of “isms”); that age of such false philosophies as that of the supremely tedious and very silly Kant, and the abominable Hume (what would Aristotle have made of Hume! Mincemeat, I suppose); the age of the hate-inflamed Gibbon, who blindly copied the coward, Voltaire, who thrice asked to see a priest, each on an occasion when he thought himself in peril of death, his fear lasting as long as the danger, so that he finally died without Confession, as he, if anybody ever did, deserved; an age of ill-health in body and in soul; of every kind of vice, excess, and perversion: and in that respect an age so like our own that it is no wonder that we continue to call it by that most ironic Kantian name: Enlightenment. This has not a little to do with the fact that our histories in the English language have almost universally been written by those hostile to Catholicism and therefore to truth, with the inevitable result that their writings are, as they well know, a pack of lies, from the first page until the final period of the last. If anybody doubts this, or thinks that I write from religious bias (one cannot be biased towards the truth), let him read Macaulay, Gibbon, A. G. Dickens, Burnet, Robertson, Trevelyan, G. R. Elton, H. E. Marshall, Milner, Murray, Froude, and Priestley, and compare them with reality as demonstrated by the primary sources, one’s own senses, and one’s own reason, even should he not accept the authority of the Catholic Church.