Silence

This post contains spoilers. Read the book or see the film, and then return.

Are you willing to die for your Christian faith? If subjected to torture would you apostatize out of weakness or doubt? Most Christians would like to think that they would not apostatize and would faithfully walk the path of the martyrs. But the very fact that the Church honors and venerates the martyrs, exalting them highly, tells you that martyrdom is a special calling and a glorious achievement, one that not all of us could accomplish (though we pray to be granted their strength.)

But what if your faith did have that rare strength of the martyrs, and was willing to suffer torture and death for Christ's sake -- but your tormentors were especially cunning. Having realized that the glory of the martyrs does in fact fuel the growth and strength of the Church, your tormentors, instead of subjecting you to cruel physical torments, subjected your fellow Christians to torture, forcing you to observe, unless you apostatized. Because they know that creating apostates is a much more effective tactic at hurting the Church than creating martyrs.

This thought experiment is posited in Silence--both the brilliant book by Shusako Endo and the new film by Martin Scorsese, the latter being a very faithful adaptation of the former (though the book is rich and has more dimensions than just this animating question.)

The Christian faith had begun to expand and get a foothold in Japan during the decades before the events depicted in Silence (set in the 1630s), having converted even a number of feudal lords and their subjects, but the shogun began to harshly crackdown on the faith, abruptly coming to see its expansion as a threat to the Japanese way of life.

In this context, two Portuguese Jesuit missionaries, Fr. Garrpe and Rodriguez, head to Japan, both to serve its persecuted Catholic minority--facing a harsh crackdown which had deprived it of spiritual leadership and forced Christians into hiding their religion--and to see about the fate of their teacher in the faith, Fr. Ferreira, who is rumored to have apostatized.

Rodriguez, after spending time serving Christian villages in secret, having observed Christians subject themselves to brutal torture and martyrdom to protect his secrecy, and struggling mightily with his faith as a consequence, is eventually captured. The diabolical inquisitor, Inoue, allows him to serve his fellow captured Christians for weeks, to the point where Rodriguez almost enjoys his captivity, serving Christians he came to help and growing closer to them.

What Rodriguez doesn't realize is that the inquisitor is fanning his love for these Christians to use it as the ultimate weapon against him. The climax of the story comes as Rodriguez is forced to watch a number of the Japanese Christians he had been serving hung upside down in the pit, and told they would remain there--the torture often lasting days before they died--unless he apostatized by trampling on the fumie, an icon of Christ. And he is being prodded to do so by his old teacher, Fr. Ferreira, who himself had apostatized after being hung in the pit, and who has become convinced that Christianity can't flourish in Japan.

When standing before the icon, with the Christians hanging in the pit, Rodriguez hears the voice of Christ telling him to trample on the image, because Christ came to suffer for men's sake. But is this the voice of Christ? Or is Rodriguez attempting to soothe his own conscience? Did Christ come to suffer with men, and thereby imbue faithful suffering, even unto death, with his own Life? Or did he come to eradicate suffering by his own suffering?

These are the weighty questions raised by this powerful book and film. While I don't see the book as an apologia for apostasy, as some have accused it of being, I'm also wary of the opposite read that sees Rodriguez' end as straightforward 'liberation.' Scorsese's take on the ending--hopeful, but ultimately leaving judgment of Rodriguez's actions to God--faithfully captures and embodies the tension of the book's resolution.

That being said, I do sympathize with the more 'cynical' reading of the ending somewhat. Not because Silence openly valorizes Rodriguez's apostasy--I don't think it does that--but because it embraces ambiguity where the reality is somewhat more clear than is suggested. Christ has come to suffer with men, and open up suffering, if embraced faithfully, as a path to salvation; alleviating the suffering of others is part of the Christian call, but must always be subservient to the higher call of faithfulness.

Apostasy, even if 'only' outward, can never be justified for "whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven" (Matt. 10:32-33).

Sounding as if he were commenting on Silence himself (though he definitely wasn't, as he was writing long before the book was written), Ivan Ilyin puts it this way:

Only love can save a person and set him free. Its first and most basic form is sympathy for the suffering one. A person feels for someone in his torment, sympathizes with him, and begins to demonstrate a living and constructive participation. He forgets about himself, living for the sake of the other person's suffering, and by doing so he frees himself from dwelling on his own pain and individual grief. His own personhood no longer binds or blinds him; in its place someone else's personhood begins to overcome him, filling his life and soul. If he doesn't notice this in time to defeat this new prison, then he will soon become prisoner of another creature's torment. As long as sympathy has the final say and remains the highest expression of his love, the suffering of any living being will seem to him a tragedy or misfortune, and he will see the existing 'evil' in every creature's torment. He begins to believe that the higher purpose of life lies in mankind's deliverance from suffering. He can no longer bear to see a suffering being, and the battle against suffering becomes his primary concern. A life without illness becomes the highest earthly concern.

Is this not precisely what has happened to Rodriguez? An overly sanguine reading of the story's resolution, or even a somewhat ambiguous one, can obscure the fact that apostasy can not be justified or made into a faithful act.

None of this should be taken as criticism of either the book or the film, which I do believe are brilliant works. The ability to sustain variant readings, while wrestling with some of the most intractable enigmas of Christian faith, is a feature rather than a bug. But we should nevertheless be wary of one of modernity's more subtle tricks: treating a settled truth as if it were an open question.

Americanism

This bizarre book acutely, perceptively traces the Puritan lineage of what the author describes as Americanism, from the founders up through Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In that journey, Puritanism is transmogrified into Americanism, or 'American Zionism', which is a new biblical religion.

Americanism is Christian, but with a particular emphasis on the Old Testament and ancient Israel, its adherents seeing in America a new Israel, a new chosen people.

Standing athwart the secularist framing of America's history, Gelernter shouts 'stop!' America's origins were deeply religious, Puritan more specifically, and that seed remains--if in an altered form--today. The founders advocated freedom of religion, not indifference to it, and the framing that casts them as avid, intentional secularists is misleading.

Gelernter's analysis of America's traditions of liberty, equality, and democracy, as well as the desire to spread this American Creed to the world, being deeply rooted in its Puritan founding is profound and illuminating. As is his persistent insistence that this American religion is a neo-Judaizing form of Christianity (applying Scriptures to America that ought to apply to the Church.) What is strange is his belief that this is a good thing. And not only believing that, but exalting this American Zionism in the most lofty tones.

While, to someone of a reactionary (and Orthodox) bent (like myself), his accurate analysis should not inspire praise but utter horror. From the founding, to Lincoln, to Wilson, what Gelernter singles out as highlights in his reading of American history, and the almost religious reverence he holds for these figures and their devotion to the American Creed, is downright creepy.

Noting the religious, biblical character of the founders, and other crucial persons in American history, like Lincoln, is all well and good, but Puritanism with its "zeal not according to knowledge" is a profoundly dangerous force. And the judaizing which Gelernter (himself a Jew) praises so highly is literally the first Christian heresy, one that arises during the timeframe of events recorded in the New Testament. That these forces formed the basis of the nation is telling, and not something to be celebrated unequivocally (if at all).

Also, while Gelernter perceptively traces the transformation of Puritanism into Unitarianism, and later Americanism, he eventually loses the plot. He casts contemporary secularists and leftists as having abandoned this Puritan-based Americanism of the founders, Lincoln, Wilson etc., but that is not exactly correct. Americanism always had the seeds of Universalism within it, and it has since transformed into this. The desire to spread the American Creed to the globe, which he recognizes, especially with Woodrow Wilson, is the basis of this Universalism. This is the global progressivism, the secularism, that Gelernter sees as simply antithetical to Americanism, rather than a new mutation of it.

But that's precisely what it is. As Puritanism became, eventually, post-Puritan, so too did Americanism become post-Americanist in its globalist, universalist incarnation.

Near the end of the book (published in 2007) Gelernter writes presciently that "the next great American religious revival will start, my guess is, on college campuses--and it will start fairly soon. The need is great." And indeed it has! The fervor with which campus SJWs are, in a manner of speaking, excommunicating heretics, burning witches, and demanding fidelity to a set of dogmas is quite religious indeed. They also act in the name of the same gods of the Puritan-American Creed: liberty (or liberation), equality, and democracy (though one might add 'progress'). And they still have a sacred belief in a chosen people, in a new Israel, but it's not Americans. It's the global oppressed.

When Americanism, with its liberal Creed, ultimately begins to look eerily like Marxism, reactionaries are not surprised in the least. Neocons like Gelernter, on the other hand, are poised to miss the deep continuity between the Americanism they love and the post-Americanism they think they hate.

The Empire Was Good, But Not *That* Empire.

In Rogue One there are two factions of the Rebellion. Broadly speaking, they are moderates and extremists. The moderates are still seeking to affect political change via diplomacy, while the extremists are convinced that the corruption of the Empire is such that only radical, violent resistance--revolution--will do.

Neocon boosters of American Empire like Sonny Bunch, who enjoy LARPing as the Galactic Empire, do so in vain. The Rebellion--democratic, anti-authoritarian, egalitarian, and very much universalist in its aspirations and pretensions--is American Empire in seed form. Comparisons of Dick Cheney to Darth Vader notwithstanding, American Empire functions by spreading, or attempting to spread, American values of democracy, liberty, and equality to the globe. Not exactly high on Vader's list of priorities, but right in the wheelhouse of the Rebellion. The two sides are not Empire and anti-Empire, but competing Empires. Not all Imperia are created equal.

Observing the factionalism of the Rebellion in the film naturally brings to mind Islam (jihadis and non-jihadis), but it is better correlated with the Puritan North (abolitionist and non-, later interventionist and non-). The Rebellion is too democratic, diverse, and egalitarian for it to be an appropriate analog to Islam. Puritan Yankees fit the bill much better. The same Yankees that were the victors who came to define America, and spread its secularized Puritanism to much of the globe.

Others have made similar critiques of Bunch, rightly recognizing that America is much better correlated with the Rebellion than the Empire. But both sides of this argument miss the mark for a simple reason: both assume American Empire is a force for good in the world. It's an intra-neocon squabble that is easily resolved: Bunch likes to root for the bad guys in film and troll (who doesn't?) Not much more to it than that.

But it turns out Bunch is correct by accident. The rebels are a force for evil in the galaxy, as is America to the globe; the Empire are the protags, but they are not America (or even the neocon segment of it.) The Empire are the defenders of power and order, hierarchy and authority, tradition and obedience, harnessing spiritual power to quell dissension among the people, securing a new Pax Romana against the forces of global (or galactic) liberalism. The Empire is Holy Mother Russia.*

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*It's to be expected that the screenwriters would attempt to tar the Empire and its values with allusions to Nazism and planetary ethnic cleansing. To maintain the analogy we just note that the hysterical anti-trad equivalent of 'planetary ethnic cleansing' in the Current Year would be something benign like anti-homosexual-propaganda laws.

Against Imminent Flourishing

Encountering the assumptions and norms of secular, liberal Universalism, we need to train ourselves to distinguish the particular assumptions of this worldframe from obvious truths, for which they are often confused. Because this frame is our inheritance—for better or for worse—this requires some training and discipline.

To understand the depth of the problem, and the insidious nature of the enemy, let's look at something that, on its face, may appear straightforward and uncontroversial: The Human Development Index (HDI.) The HDI, per Wikipedia, "is a composite statistic of life expectancy, education, and per capita income indicators, which are used to rank countries into four tiers of human development."

Bracketing the question of what exact data, metrics, standards, and procedures are used for establishing the rankings, what could be controversial here? Longer life expectancy, better education, and greater amounts of income are uncontroversially better than their opposites, and the HDI ranks accordingly. How could anyone, secular Universalist or not, dissent?

Here we recall that Christians worship Jesus Christ, the Theanthropos, who likely had moderate levels of formal education, lived a life of voluntary poverty, and was brutally executed at a fairly young age. The supreme human life, according to the Christian, fails on all three measures of "Human Development": education, income, and life expectancy.

Not only that, but Christ exhorted his followers to "take up your cross and follow me", into that very same life of simplicity and sacrifice. If his followers were to be successful according to Christ, their lot would entail a martyric form of life, if not martyrdom itself (and all of the apostles were in fact martyred, save for St. John); if they were to be successful according to the world, it would not.

This is not, of course, to suggest that education is bad, money anathema, or that we should aim for the shortest lives possible. It is to say that what is deemed to be "flourishing" in the purely imminent frame of the secular materialist, will always necessarily be a secondary, at best, concern for the traditional Christian. And that in many instances, what would increase stature in the imminent frame, would diminish it in the eternal. The two can't be reconciled.

All other considerations being equal, a devout, faithful, uneducated woman who dies giving birth to her fifth child at a young age is of incomparably higher stature in the Kingdom than a selfishly childless, successful, careerist secularist who lives to a ripe old-age, having aborted many children along the way. On the HDI, the former hurts your nation's rankings and the latter helps them.

And how easily we (opponents of the secular-Universalist project), slip into adopting their framing as our own. When presented with HDI rankings, rather than striking immediately to the question of the underlying presuppositions, we instead seek to explain the data in favorable ways. "The highest ranked nations are secular European ones, who all have Christian histories and retain Christian principles, even if in deracinated form." However true that may be, that tack accepts that the metrics of 'human development' are fundamentally correct, when they are actually quite irrelevant to the actual sine qua non of human flourishing: salvation.

And many other non-ultimate, but still highly crucial, metrics of actual human development are routinely left out of the frame of the secular Universalist: moral sense and constitution; aesthetically pleasing cities; high TFR, etc.

When we argue that pornography is bad, not because it degrades the soul by divorcing the sexual act from the intimacy, blessedness, and fecundity of the marital bond, and objectifies humans in the service of self-gratification, but because it harmfully re-wires neural pathways, we repeat the mistake. The latter fact may be empirical evidence of the former truth (which can be accessed independently via revelation), but to make it the central plank of the case is to embrace the secularist, materialist frame.

This overreliance on data, and with it the multiplication of 'problems' for 'reformers' to solve, Helen Andrews has dubbed "bloodless moralism." Meanwhile for us, as Thomas Carlyle puts it, "tables [of data, statistics] are like cobwebs, like the sieve of the Danaides; beautifully reticulated, orderly to look upon, but which will hold no conclusion."

It's imperative that Christian reactionaries and traditionalists avoid succumbing to the conservative temptation of attempting to beat liberals at their own game, here. And it's tempting to do so, because the data is in fact on our side, when it is correlated with a proper telos. But being obsessively and myopically "data-driven" is a feature of the Left, and is a product of its implacable imminentism. Christian reactionaries are concerned with the sacred, the eternal, the immortal, and locating those within the imminent. But tacitly accepting the imminent frame as the supreme one is to allow the secular-Universalist to set the rules of engagement and, thus, to lose.

The Heresy of Solutionism

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. 

Of the many currents seething beneath the surface of our social reality, one that is not often reflected on is our deep-seated commitment to solutionism. What I'm calling solutionism has significant overlap with pragmatism, as well as scientism and positivism, but it is more properly the belief that all problems admit of in-principle solutions that are ultimately discoverable by human reason and ingenuity.

Practically, most people in our culture think and speak as if this were true, even if they wouldn't cop to believing that all problems are soluble when the question is put to them. None of the platforms of any of the political parties in the United States, major or minor, contain any planks that read "there is not much that can be done about this, to be honest." Or "all available options in this realm are inexorably fraught with peril. Weep and gnash your teeth." Because secular theology has declared the centrality and dominion of man-without-God, and determined that if man is not yet omnipotent, he must become so.

Consider that most intractable problem: death and aging. While acknowledging that there are those intrepid, brash futurists out there who believe even these problems can be solved, let's grant that most people consider them insoluble. Do we actually behave as if they are? Do we obsess over diet and exercise, in lieu of loftier pursuits? Is cosmetic surgery a multi-billion dollar industry? Do women past a certain age refuse to state their age out loud? Do we make a cult out of youth and build large segments of our economy around it? Do we exile the elderly to spend their latter decades apart from their families, and denigrate their wisdom and experience as ignorant and backwards? Have we removed care of the dead and cemeteries from our churches and churchyards to more remote professionals and locations? None of these actions will solve death and dying, of course, but deep down that's what we hope we're doing.

In The Elementary Particles, which examines the problem of death and the urge to overcome it, Michel Houellebecq writes:

In contemporary Western society, death is like white noise to a man in good health; it fills his mind when his dreams and plans fade. With age, the noise becomes increasingly insistent, like a dull roar with the occasional screech. In another age the sound meant waiting for the kingdom of God; it is now an anticipation of death. 

Elsewhere in the book, he depicts the lengths people go to in order to turn down the white noise, and to push death to the periphery of their awareness. For want of a solution, at least at this date, we will deny the problem for as long as it's feasible.

If our actions reveal that we believe death can be solved, any lesser problem—and every problem is lesser—must not only be soluble, but comparatively simple. The planet will soon be destroyed by anthropogenic catastrophic global-warming, you say? We should have acted decades ago and it's too late, but still, we must "do something." We've enacted every gun restriction we could dream up, save confiscation, and people still get shot? It is imperative that we "do something" more. A just political order can only arise from a virtuous people, but we are corrupt and decadent? There must be an app for that.

The desperate anxiety of our society can in part be seen as the result of belief in the solubility of all problems, which in turn can be understood as the fruit of our Enlightenment addiction to rational certainty. Returning to The Elementary Particles, Houellebecq writes:

There is no power in the world—economic, political, religious or social—that can compete with rational certainty. Western society is interested beyond all measure in philosophy and politics, and the most vicious, ridiculous conflicts have been about philosophy and politics; it has also had a passionate love affair with literature and the arts, but nothing in its history has been as important as the need for rational certainty. The West has sacrificed everything to this need: religion, happiness, hope—and, finally, its own life.

Rationalism gives way to seeing technological mastery of the world as an end in itself and humanity's raison d'etre. Technological advances further feed the illusion of the independence and potential omnipotence of man.

Sober reflection on the human condition reveals that most of our perennial problems admit of no solution within the immanent frame. Technological and social advances often introduce new problems and unintended consequences. At best we're left navigating a system of trade-offs, with most of society's problems being insoluble. But this is cause for sobriety, not despair. The stuff of life is, blessedly, not found in solving the world's problems. If it were, no man to date would have lived.

For Christians, this should be rather obvious, because if we were called to implement societal reforms and build utopia on earth, Our Lord probably would have mentioned this to us at some point. As Nicolás Gómez Dávila puts it, "that Christianity may not solve social problems is no reason to commit apostasy except for those who forget that it never promised to solve them." Instead, Christ came preaching a gospel of repentance and obedience to His commandments, the fruit of which is salvation, fully realized only in the eschaton.

The process of repentance and keeping the commandments entails things like serving, and giving to, the poor, of course, but not with the world's end of eliminating poverty in view. Poverty never appears as an enemy in the gospel; wealth does. And, as Christ's encounter with the rich young ruler reveals (Matt. 19:16-22), the problem of wealth is solved by detachment from the things of the world, and attachment to the things of the Kingdom of Heaven.

The Kingdom appears in the immanent frame, especially in the worshiping, sacramental life of the Church, by "laying aside all earthly cares", as we sing at the beginning of the liturgy of the Eucharist in the Orthodox Church. Solutions to the worst problems—sin and death—exist in Christ, but they are eternal realities and gifts from God, not worldly projects and designs.

The folly of solutionism was first clearly seen at the Tower of Babel. Its modern day analogs would be the Headquarters of the United Nations and the Capitol Building in Washington D.C.; its antidote—its solution—is the cathedral.

Disney at Peak Propaganda

It's generally taken for granted by most Christians and social conservatives that, when it comes to culture, Hollywood is a cesspool of liberalism and degeneracy which functions as the de facto propaganda wing of the secular state. Much of its messaging, especially as it appears in children shows and films, is subtle enough that many tend not to notice it and dismiss conservative concerns as paranoia. With Disney's Zootopia, the mask is off.

From the first frame to the last, the film advances from one liberal conceit to another without bothering to cloak its overt agenda.

Beginning with an account of the historical advance of society from primitive and savage times, when predators devoured prey and the animal kingdom was ruled by primal instincts, to modern animal times when predator and prey, having "evolved", live together in peace and harmony, the film traffics heavily in liberal mythology. From the opening scene, one is already immersed in an animal version of Whig history. 

To make matters worse, in the same scene a sheep with a rainbow on its head (clearly representing the LGBT community) appears and declares that, thanks to this advance from savage primal days to the days of reason, he no longer lives in fear of "coming out" from among the flock. The hetero reign of tyranny that is western civilization, in which aberrant sexualities have always been violently suppressed, is just an obvious truth. As obvious as the good of promoting the expression of said sexualities without any objection or reservation (which would be bigotry).

From there we encounter a common theme in Disney films, as our young, idealistic, protagonist female bunny, Judy Hopps, feels stifled by her hick-farmer parents, their rural life, and traditional values. From Ariel to Jasmine to Merida, petulant adolescent rebellion against parental authority and the wisdom of tradition has been a staple of the Disney animated film genre for a long time. It rears its ugly head again here, as the film openly mocks traditional ways of life -- represented by the carrot-farmer parents -- as closed-minded and "fearful." In contrast to this, the young protagonist's cosmopolitan adventurism is portrayed as a healthy rejection of her parent's way of life, and probably the only genuine way to live.

Following the motto of Zootopia (the large animal city, where predator and prey live and work together in blissful accord), a place where "Anyone Can Be Anything!", the young female bunny Judy heads off to the big city in order to become a police(wo)man, providing yet another example of the "strong female character" taking on a characteristically male career. 

Don't ask whether there are sensible reasons certain professions, like police officer, firefighter, and coal miner, are male dominated, while others are dominated by women. Assume with us, won't you, that it's the patriarchy oppressing strong women everywhere, forcing them into submission as pitiable domestic slaves. Also assume that there are no such things as characteristically male and female traits, virtues, skills, and weaknesses. Such thoughts must not be spoken here.

As we will see later, the film isn't presenting the city's exceptionally naive motto ("Anyone can be Anything!") as absolutely true, but the later circumspection merely modifies, rather than contradicts, the basic message which the motto represents. The self-esteem movement has created a generation of dysfunctional narcissists, yet cultural elites still refuse to abandon its fundamental conceit. Namely, that everyone is a special snowflake whose desires society should cater to and aim to fulfill.

Once in the big city, Judy observes an event in which a business owner (an elephant, which I'm sure just coincidentally corresponds to the animal which represents the GOP) denies service to a customer, citing his "We Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone" sign. Appalled by the sight of a business owner exercising his right of free association in business, our heroine -- while she doesn't pass a law that would force him to bake the cake (it's actually ice cream) -- threatens him with legal action on an unrelated matter, effectively pressuring him into serving the customer. Cultural cronyism at work. 

If that weren't preachy and condescending enough, in the very same scene a young fox thinks he is an elephant, a delusion for which he receives fawning adulation from surrounding adults. Trans-speciesism among children is something to be encouraged in Zootopia, let there be no doubt.

Crowning the suite of liberal propaganda points, certain predators in Zootopia (and only predators) have begun to "go savage", seemingly reverting to their bloodthirsty nature. Judy posits a biological explanation for why it is only predators going savage, and not prey. Her fox friend, a predator, is appalled by her speciesism, and the harmony of Zootopia subsequently devolves into inter-special resentment and distrust thanks to our heroine's Islamophob-- er, predatoraphobic bigotry. At this point I looked up the writing credits for the film, expecting to find Angela Merkel or Justin Trudeau. 

But fear not. Judy dutifully repents of her bigotry, genuflecting deeply before those she has offended -- even though her conclusion was eminently justified by all available evidence. But following the evidence is not always the preferred course of action, and can be misleading, as we later find out. It turns out that the fact it was only predators "going savage" was the result of a giant conspiracy! Prey can "go savage" too! Lesson learned: no matter how much reason and evidence point in a particular direction, there's always a more convoluted explanation which will account for less, but which nevertheless is in accord with liberal dogma. Think: "global warming is the primary cause of terrorism."

In a last-ditch and halfhearted attempt to moderate the film's liberal extremism, the closing monologue injects a dose of faux humility. Recognizing the Zootopian motto of "Anyone Can Be Anything!" to be overly idealistic, due to various weaknesses of animal nature (weaknesses like tradition and conservatism), the film trades 20th century leftist utopianism for a duly chastened 21st century liberalism. Utopia may not be possible as a destination (due to intractable reactionary forces forever opposing 'progress'), but as a goal, a steady advance towards utopia, along with a continual eradication of backwards-thinking conservatives and their ideology, is still always worth pursuing.

Christians and conservatives have never mistaken Hollywood for a friend, to our credit. The next step is recognizing it as the openly hostile enemy, the savage beast out to devour our children, that it plainly is.