When of one mind, Janus' views
form a composite of his two main sides. He attempts to consider issues with care and thoughtfulness, though he remains biased towards Christianity and Western
traditions. Outsiders might call him a Conservative, but in fact he is a Fundamentalist in that he promotes the Christian values that raised Western civilization to its peak.
One of the faces, looking to our right and called Patulcius, is the headstrong and determined side of Janus, tending to authoritarian ideals. Patulcius looks to history and upholds the traditions of
Christianity and Western civilization, and the well-being of Western nations. Patulcius sees world events as a struggle between divine and demonic
forces.
The other face—the easy-going, more open-minded, left-facing Clusivius—dislikes authority and prefers a more individualistic outlook. Clusivius looks to the future and contemplates changes. While
Christian, Clusivius takes an interest in the well-being of other civilizations as well as the Western. Clusivius tends to believe that elitist conspiracies play a major part in world events.
When possible, the complete Janus seeks to form a synthesis of the two sides when making a decision. At other times Janus allows any differences to stand without resolution. But now and again the two sides must battle one another until one side wins Janus' acceptance.
Tending to sensationalize, and sometimes to hyperbolize, C. F. van Niekerk over-analyzes any number of subjects from mundane minutiae to the great philosophical questions of life itself.
Katáxiros, the parched one, alone and adrift at sea, yet ever rowing ahead anyhow, sometimes weakly and sometimes vigorously, thirsting after God through the Orthodox Christian Church, contemplating the ways of the Lord, recognizing that while he is inadequate to the task, he must press ever ahead. Katáxiros writes about matters pertaining specifically to the Orthodox Church.
Barzillai Alpheus Bozarth claims to be a 19th Century man marooned in the 21st Century after a failed experiment in inter-dimensional travel. Not at all impressed with the wonders of our time, he would give just about anything to return to his beloved world of "horse manure and civilized etiquette". Barzillai writes historical observations and pores over old books and documents.
We don't know what to make of the Wanderer. He walks in with the moon and rolls out with the wind. He uses no name; the smells of rank sweat, dirt, and smoke mark him as much as anything. He's always near, but never close. Heedless of human ideals and bounds, he stands unyielding for honor on the ground. He's practical to a fault when he's not romantic to even greater fault. He says little, but when he does finally speak, we listen up. The Wanderer is our lawman of final resort. By hook or by crook, he sees a job done, just don't ask how. Frankly, we're a little afraid of the Wanderer.
Nature can be cruel to mankind.
If Concussus had his way, nature would be crueler yet. Concussus tends to arrive at the blackest of times, when humanity seems the most despicable.
Diabolus, the devil's advocate. Sometimes we are tempted to embrace the evil world that we despise. Diabolus is there to encourage us in this folly. Fortunately a rare visitor here.
– 9 December 2022 –
Janus:
“But ask the animals, and they will teach you,
or the birds in the sky, and they will tell you;
or speak to the earth, and it will teach you,
or let the fish in the sea inform you.
Which of all these does not know
that the hand of the Lord has done this?
In his hand is the life of every creature
and the breath of all mankind.
Does not the ear test words
as the tongue tastes food?
Is not wisdom found among the aged?
Does not long life bring understanding?
– Job 12:7-12
Like trees in the soil growing into forests tied to the land among the beasts and the foliage, among the mountains and the rivers and the fluttering plains, so do the tribes of men grow into nations tied to the magnificence of God’s creation in a particular time and place, in particular conditions.
The tribes of people bring their own characters and traits, but the land in which they are born, where they toil and grow, where they raise children and children’s children, where they are buried in the earth, that land shapes a people into the nations they become.
When the men and women of the British Isles cast their seed in the lands of America, to grow and spread and live here from generation unto generation, the human trees of Europe sprouted into new soil and became new forests shaped by this new land.
And what of this land that they found? The unfamiliar hills and foliage and rivers and beasts seemed untamed and virgin to these sons and daughters of the old cultivated world of farms and towns, but this continent was already home to peoples and nations who thoroughly belonged to this wilderness.
The hundreds of nations that we called “Indians” lived according to their lands, and their lands shaped their blood, but the Indians in turn shaped the lands themselves. They hunted and planted and burned and cleared to serve their own survival.
These lands were the Indians’, but the Indians belonged to these lands for thousands of years, and these peoples left their marks even long after their time had passed. Just as Americans of old have left their marks today.
As the hundreds of nations of Indians died away, so the nations of what became the Americans were born. Right or wrong in the details; in the fallen natures of men, the plain fact is that the Americans came, that they and the Indians fought viciously over centuries, and ultimately the Indians all but died from war and disease and depression, or they fled or interbred with the Americans, pushed out of this country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Plains and below the Great Lakes. All but gone save their scattered monuments and relics, the signs and wonders of the peoples and nations who once belonged to these lands.
“To God belong wisdom and power;
counsel and understanding are his.
What he tears down cannot be rebuilt;
those he imprisons cannot be released.
If he holds back the waters, there is drought;
if he lets them loose, they devastate the land.
To him belong strength and insight;
both deceived and deceiver are his.
He leads rulers away stripped
and makes fools of judges.
He takes off the shackles put on by kings
and ties a loincloth around their waist.
He leads priests away stripped
and overthrows officials long established.
He silences the lips of trusted advisers
and takes away the discernment of elders.
He pours contempt on nobles
and disarms the mighty.
He reveals the deep things of darkness
and brings utter darkness into the light.
He makes nations great, and destroys them;
he enlarges nations, and disperses them.
– Job 12:13-23
Nations and peoples rise and fall according to God’s mysterious Will. “From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands.” (Acts 17:26) The Bible demonstrates this reality over and over again.
The great hills and mountains, the rivers and plains, the flora and fauna, all of them formed the rich soil out of which the Americans spread and fought and conquered and ruled in their own particular ways.
From largely British stock, the new world crafted a bold new people, marked by their rugged faith, their spirit of independence, their love of liberty and knowledge, their determination to make and discover their own ways in life for better and for worse. God raised them up, and they were a fine people.
Conservative types often like to say that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian country. While technically this isn’t so, as the country was established as a liberal and secular Enlightenment project, the bulk of these people were fiercely devoted to God and their Protestant Christian faith.
While Christianity had started to decline to a cultural exercise in most of 19th Century Europe, devotion and even zeal for Jesus Christ and the Word of God remained closely tied to the lives of everyday Americans.
One traveler to the U.S. from Great Britain in the 1840’s observed what he deemed as an unfortunate tendency towards fanaticism in this country, but which turned out to be a healthy revivalism:
I have already intimated that sect in America is not wanting in occasional ebullitions of zeal and fanaticism. Indeed with some sects fanaticism sometimes attains an extravagance which borders on the sublime. As violent fits could not last long without exhausting the body, so these periodic religious spasms — fortunately for the sanity of the public mind, — although they pretty frequently occur, are only temporary in their duration. Some sects are cooler in their moral temperament than others, and are seldom or ever affected by them; but others are afflicted with them almost with the regularity, though with longer intervals between, of shivering fits during an attack of ague. The denominations most unfortunate in this respect are the Baptists and Methodists, whilst occasionally the more sober Presbyterians sympathise and fall a prey to the disorder. The moral distemper which on these occasions seizes upon masses of the population, is termed a “revival.” Such visitations are not rare amongst ourselves, but it is seldom that they attain anything like the appalling influence which they sometimes gain in America. Like a physical epidemic, their course is uncertain and capricious, frequently attacking communities which have always been ranked amongst those morally healthy, and passing over, in reaching them, others which had previously exhibited themselves in a state of almost chronic religious derangement. These revivals, when they occur, at first generally embrace but one sect; but if they take hold of the public, they soon draw other denominations into the movement, which do not, however, throw aside their distinctiveness in taking part in it.
(MacKay, Alex; The Western World; or, Travels in the United States in 1846-47, 1849)
As much as they loved independence, industry, freedom, and their Protestant Christian faith, the Americans also celebrated the life-long pursuit of knowledge about their world. Wherever Americans spread, along with churches and democratic governments, they quickly established newspapers, libraries, schools, and literary associations.
In his travels through America in the 1830’s, the French liberal Alexander de Tocqueville observed in Democracy in America that, even along the wild frontier, the Americans celebrated knowledge and intelligence. “There is hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare. I remember that I read the feudal play of Henry V for the first time in a loghouse.”
The lyceum movement particularly demonstrates a very American approach to the lifelong pursuit of knowledge and improvement, flourishing for a century in the large cities in the East and the rural towns in the territories.
The American Lyceum was an educational institution of a type peculiarly fitted to be useful to the people of the United States during the second quarter of the Nineteenth century. The basic part of the lyceum system was the town or village lyceums, which were local mutual educational associations. The usual plan of activity followed by the town lyceum was to hold weekly meetings, at which lectures and talks were given by members, or by members of other lyceums, who had some information not possessed by all. They discussed topics of general interest, debated, or watched the performance of some scientific experiment. Lecturers were frequently brought in from outside the community. Anyone who was interested was allowed to become a member. The young people who had not been privileged to go to school (there were great numbers of them) were especially invited. Teachers were urged to help and to profit by the contacts to be made and information to be gained.
(Hayes, Cecil B., The American Lyceum; Its History and Contribution to Education, 1932)
These characteristics served the Americans well in their conquering and forging of a great nation upon a wild and savage land, a land that brought satisfying rewards from these peoples’ independent but mutually-supportive toil and suffering. Shaped by the hardships of settling and civilizing this land, the unique qualities of the American peoples helped them to grow stubbornly strong and hardy, like a tough new forest that supplanted the old, taking on some of the characteristics of the old while bringing out the strongest of their own inherited personalities. They suffered and they worked; they played and they sang; they built beloved families and raised their animals with care; they sought to learn about the wonders of their beautiful and marvelous world; and from this toil and strife they shrugged off any bitterness and always knew that the future lay within the loving hands of God.
In general, the spirit that predominated within the collective character of white Americans from their early years to more recent decades has managed to build, through God’s Grace and Providence, a more-or-less united people who exemplified vigor and industry, independence and freedom, faith and civic-mindedness and optimism.
There is so much to celebrate in this nation, these peoples, that comprised old America. Generations of Americans embodied this spirit, but now those generations are nearly passed. Their remnants are dying before our eyes, passing into the night like the Indians before them, all but gone.
Old America has died and will never return to this fallen earth. There is no bringing it back to life on this side of Judgment Day. How we love and miss them!
A new America surrounds us. Where once great trees stood together in forests (miles and miles of strong pillars reaching their plumes high towards the heavens), the forests were first chopped into fragmented glades to make room for business; then only isolated trees stood in twos and threes after they bulldozed the glades to make room for comfort. Now scattered lonely trees tentatively stand, actively being replaced by limp and unhealthy vines that snake across the ground, looking for a tree to hold them up and increasingly finding none, all in the name of delusion.
From this destruction will rise new nations, built from the cherished memories of the old, built from the examples of the once great and departed nation and from the mercies and providence of God who honors His people even as He chastises them to make them seek Him for their own benefit.
He will build new glades and new forests, people who will remember Him and all the contributions that His people made before him.
May we gather the relics of those departed people with wonder and respect even as we take the best from their lives and apply their lessons to our own.
May we honor them and remember our Lord forever, memory eternal.
Then Job replied to the Lord:
“I know that you can do all things;
no purpose of yours can be thwarted.
You asked, ‘Who is this that obscures my plans without knowledge?’
Surely I spoke of things I did not understand,
things too wonderful for me to know.
“You said, ‘Listen now, and I will speak;
I will question you,
and you shall answer me.’
My ears had heard of you
but now my eyes have seen you.
Therefore I despise myself
and repent in dust and ashes.”
– Job 42:1-6
The Lord blessed the latter part of Job’s life more than the former part. He had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen and a thousand donkeys. And he also had seven sons and three daughters. The first daughter he named Jemimah, the second Keziah and the third Keren-Happuch. Nowhere in all the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters, and their father granted them an inheritance along with their brothers.
After this, Job lived a hundred and forty years; he saw his children and their children to the fourth generation. And so Job died, an old man and full of years.
– Job 42:12-17
[. . . and most especially on Grandma Marian, Lord, bless that dear woman and give her peace and rest, forgiving her any sin that she may ever have committed in life. In Your Glorious Name, Amen.]
Obama, the leader of all that is wrong with today’s United States, 
A coalition of supposedly conservative Yankee do-gooders and Southern liberal groups has formed to guilt-trip the White folks of Mississippi to 
FINES ET INITIA 