Wow!
Here is what England is:
She is more than a thousand years of uninterrupted Christian faith, from St. Alban, the first English martyr, killed during the Roman occupation in the 3rd century, to the martydrom of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More in 1535. She is the hundreds of martyrs killed during the penal times following Henry VIII’s usurpation of the church in England. She is Beowulf and “The Dream of the Rood”; she is Sir Gawain and Chaucer; she is Byrd and Tallis; she is Walsingham and Glastonbury; she is Austen and Dickens, Newman and Hopkins, Chesterton and Belloc, Waugh and Wodehouse, Lewis and Tolkien. She is Shakespeare! This is the England of our dreams, and our dreams are so much more real, in any meaningful sense, than the nightmare that the modern inhabitants of England seem to prefer. This is the England to which I owe my allegiance; the England of the saints and martyrs; the England of the poets and bards; and the England of the Greatest Bard of all. I will conclude by letting the Bard wax lyrical on the England of my dreams:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in a silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
This may explain why Rod Dreher had a point:
The intellectual arrogance identified by Alan that exists within certain Catholic circles is something I once was guilty of, without realizing it. To me, as an adult convert to Catholicism, the intellectual and aesthetic riches of the Catholic faith were so blindingly obvious that I couldn’t see that the Protestant traditions were worth taking seriously, except in a political and personal sense. That is, I respected Protestants as serious Christians and good people with whom we could and should work on causes of mutual concern, but I didn’t trouble myself to take them seriously on the intellectual front. This was an example of my unearned pride. As far as I was concerned, I had joined the intellectual A team of American Christianity, and Father Neuhaus was our Joe Torre. At the time I didn’t realize it, but looking back, I can see that the only conversations I thought really mattered were between Catholics.
As I write this, I remember a professor telling me years ago at a conference that he might have left Protestantism for Catholicism, except for the fact that his Catholic convert friends were so intellectually haughty in their newfound Catholicism that they kept him away from the Roman church. What that man experienced is a constant temptation for intellectual converts to Catholicism.
Old Life 
“When you say the Declaration of Independence ‘declares the sovereignty of God’ do you mean that Thomas Jefferson and others thought the term ‘Creator’ referred to the God of the Bible? If the main intent was to declare the sovereignty of God, would you not actually just refer to Him as ‘God’? And if this is a clever terminological compromise to accommodate Jefferson, Paine etc. doesn’t that somewhat limit the concept of the sovereignty of God? Meanwhile, poor old George III was part of a coronation ceremony that talked of God explicitly, and culminated in the anointing of the sovereign.
Sir Tristram Strieb-Griebling
http://www.reformation21.org/blog/2014/07/tristram-striebgriebling-respo.php#sthash.mQeOiALj.dpuf
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mcmark, well you beat me but I saw this independently — hooray, I’m free — of your comment.
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“…this is the England of Drs. Edward Hine and Edward Wheeler Bird and the other guardians of British Israel; the England populated by the Lost Tribe of Manasseh…”
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So says Rod Dreher, a convert to the Eastern Orthodox.
http://www.mark-shea.com/dreher.html
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We sometimes forget in our anxiousness to be conciliatory and accommodating just how mad some Roman Catholics can be! Joseph Pearce wrote a decent book called ‘Literary Converts’ in which he tries to claim Lewis and Eliot for Rome. His own background is rather colourful; ex-fascist, ex-racist agitator for the National Front, for which he served time at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I’m glad he’s out of that environment, but not one to be trusted. By the way, there is a considerable Catholic population and tradition in Scotland. Have you ever heard of Celtic FC and the rivalry with Rangers?
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Sir Tristam, I have. I’ve even heard that Roman Catholics support Scottish independence more than any other group of professing Christians.
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Is this modern “anxiety of influence” (Bloom, 1973) something which makes the Scot want to be…
free and independent?
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