Peter Hitchens: What to teach our children?

 

The question of grace before or after meals faded from my life for many atheist and secular years until my wife (raised as an atheist by a Communist father and radical mother) and I were confronted with the problem of what to teach our children. A series of revolutions had come crashing through our lives, previously filled only with ambition, long days of hard work, wanderings in foreign countries and too much wine. At some point in all this, I and then my wife found an insatiable need for what I would now call the authority of God. We weren’t going to face this business alone.

Anyone with any sort of upbringing presumably experiences this moral need in their lives if they become parents.

Birth itself is like a painful war, ending in victory. But your victory has given you a new and demanding kingdom to govern. What powers do you now have? What are the limits on them? To whom are you accountable, and what is good? You are no longer responsible only to yourselves and each other for how you behave. You are observed, and will be remembered after you are dead, in your private moments. You have to stop doing some things, hide some things and start doing others. I will not go into details, but one of the things we felt a strong need to do, quite soon, was to say grace before eating. We groped for what to say.

More.

Peter Hitchens: Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared

From his splendidly temperate and richly informative essay, LATIMER AND RIDLEY ARE FORGOTTEN: A PROTESTANT UNDERSTANDING OF ENGLAND’S MARTYRS, here:

 

 

 

 

 

 

For More and Fisher have, more or less, won. The Elizabethan settlement long ago broke down. The Anglican Church, once forged to a gleaming hardness by the fires of Bloody Mary, has rusted away. Its Catholics now brandish thuribles and don chasubles, bowed down by embroidered copes at elaborate High Masses. Even its archbishops of Canterbury now array themselves in garish vestments that would have appalled their grandfathers. Its Protestants have wandered off into a land of guitars and modern language, full of the sort of enthusiasm Anglicanism once feared and despised, its Calvinism quite undiluted by godly order, sobriety, and reverence. The Elizabethan Prayer Book, which Catholics were once forced to endure, has almost disappeared from use in its own churches, except in cathedrals, or in a few services for very old people, held early in the morning or at sunset, until the Grim Reaper takes a hand, attendance dwindles, and they stop forever. The Prayer Book’s penitential, stern theology is too rich a mixture for a land that has grown comfortable with divorce and abortion. The English Bible, that great cause for which William Tyndale was strangled, is neglected and unread, its thrilling trumpet-blasts of seventeenth-century poetry unknown even to the officially well-educated, and almost never used in church. By another paradox, Roman Catholics have their own vernacular Bible and prayers, dreadfully inferior in beauty and euphony to those of the Church of England, though few know, because they have never heard or seen anything better. The Roman Catholics have even introduced Communion in both kinds, taken to singing hymns, and brought in married priests through the back door by ordaining married Anglo-Catholic defectors to the Ordinariate. Protestant England as I knew it has almost entirely disappeared, and its once-universal opinions are now regarded as odd, eccentric, and intolerant. Only in Northern Ireland and a few corners of Scotland will you find any remnant of the once-dominant worldview that saw popery as the ally of poverty, of “brass money and wooden shoes,” and of despotism.

Let's Bring Back Hangings And The Age Of Edward

So says Peter Hitchens, here:

We disagree about almost everything, but I find him impossible to dislike. In person he is polite and engaged, and in print always a contrarian but never a controversialist, sincere in beliefs that are almost as unfashionable on the right as they are anathema to the left. He champions civil liberties but abhors libertarianism, would like to bring back hanging and see off pre-marital sex, and is in a perpetual state of lament for the passing of Christian values, which he dates back to the first world war. "If anybody else tells me that I think the 1950s were a golden age, I'll strangle them. I remember the 1950s – chilblains, Wall's ice cream, everybody smoked. I didn't like the 1950s." Hitchens's golden age was the late Victorian/early Edwardian era, a period of "How shall I say? Increasing self-imposed moral conduct."