And the wind shall say:
Here were decent godless people;
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls”
T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot is remembered as one of America’s greatest poets, and social critics, although in some ways he was more British than the British, and moved across the Pond to live there. He is perhaps best known for The Waste Land, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and the play, Murder in the Cathedral, based on the murder of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket.
The middle years of the last century were distinguished by such notable Christian writers as C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers and, of course, Eliot – all of whom cast a critical eye on the nature of the Society in which they lived.
With regard to the above quotation, What is wrong with asphalt roads? Surely, they are to be preferred to the dirt roads which crisscrossed America in the mid-1920s.
There is also nothing wrong with playing Golf, and losing the expensive little round spheres in the Rough and elsewhere. Golf, being mostly a weekend sport, has lured many from going off to the local parish church on Sundays, which resulted in many insti-tuting Saturday evening services to keep the damage from spreading.
How numerous are the decent godless people in present-day America? Another term for them is secularists – this-world-only folks. Certainly, they are among the so–called elites, who influence our tastes and attitudes. And they are dominant in our more prestigious universities, which brainwash,-so to speak, the young and impressionable. Don’t send my boy to Harvard, the dying mother said; Don’t send my boy to Princeton, I’d rather see him dead. Certain ways of thinking can be bad for one’s soul.
The problem begins earlier, however, in the Public Schools, where matters Religious are, in accordance with the Constitution, excluded from the curriculum. Since morals and ethics are rest upon a foundation, religious or quasi-religious, societal behavior can only reflect the popular notion that there is no such thing as Right and no such thing as Wrong. In effect, by demoting or even dismissing God, we become our own gods, recognizing no authority greater than ourselves.
Glory to Man in the highest,
for Man is the master of things
CWB+
9-08
