Works and Days

Works and Days: "World Beneath Their Feet" Victor David Hanson

It is ironic to travel through Italy and see nearly all of its artistic treasures, whether classical or ecclesiastical, as a dividend of a religious, confident culture, and almost nothing comparable offered by the new Europe of socialism, statism, and agnosticism.

If heaven is retiring at 55, leaving the apartment each mid-morning to sit in the local coffee shop, and then protesting on weekends about my lower than anticipated pension cost of living increase, then I would prefer hell.

(No Victor wouldn't if he understood the utter wretchedness and hopelessness of life eternally apart from God. Jesus said, "For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?" (Matthew 16:26). Indeed. The Apostle Paul writes, "For our light affliction, which is but for a moment, worketh for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory; While we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen: for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal (II Corinthians 4:17-18).

Victor correctly (I think) continues:

The great unspoken truth? Somewhere right now, a US ship, an American soldier, a circling F-16 keep the Russians honest, the fear in al Qaeda, the Straits of Hormuz open, the commerce of the Mediterranean safe–unknown, unappreciated to the mass of European utopian citizenry..."

I am reminded of a hymn which our choir sang long ago when I was in high school. The tune is called Ebenezer (Hitherto the Lord has helped me)but the words speak of a time of decision for people and nations:


Once to every man and nation
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with falsehood,
For the good or evil side;
Some great cause, God's new messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by for ever
'Twixt that darkness and that light.

(James Russell Lowell, 1819-91)