4
Historic Parallels
Paula Haigh
In the Beginning of the World
In the beginning, God gave to Adam the essential facts of His Plan for Redemption and for the Order of human society. These main facts were then and still are:
1) There is One God Who created Heaven and Earth and all that is in the universe. He gave Adam hints as to His Trinitarian nature in the Name Eloihim which is plural, in the specification of the Spirit of God that hovered over the primordial waters with the emphasis upon God’s spoken Word in the works of the Six Days.
2) God gave One Law implanted in the heart of every man. It is the voice of Conscience. God referred to it in Genesis 4:7 when Cain transgressed and it is fulfilled in prescriptions such as “Increase and multiply” (Gen. l:28). It was codified in the Ten Commandments given by God to Moses on Mount Sinai.
3) One Worship. The Law of Sacrifice is a universal one. It consists in confessing one’s nothingness before God. Such is the foundation of worship. Before the Fall, worship was unbloody, perhaps transmitted as prophetic type in the priest Melchisedech (Gen. 14:18-20) who prefigures the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass under the appearances of Bread and Wine. After the Fall, the Sacrifice of Blood became a reality with the expiation for sin exacted by God. Abel understood this but Cain did not. Cain’s worship was only one of thanksgiving which was no longer adequate and was not acceptable to God. (Nor can it be acceptable to God today from those who would deny or degrade the Sacrificial nature of the Mass.)
4) One Prophesy. This is the Proto-Evangelium of Genesis 3:15: “I will put enmities between thee and the Woman and thy seed and Her Seed; She shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for Her Heel.” Today this prophecy is partially fulfilled and in process of being completed. The Woman is the Ever-Virgin Mary and Her Seed is Christ. The Serpent’s Head is every enemy of God and ultimately the Antichrist. In ancient times this Promise and Prophecy of Redemption through a Virgin and Her Son in the Incarnation of the Word of God in the Flesh of the Virgin Mary sustained the meditations of the men who “walked with God” because it sums up the history of the world.
Besides these four essentials, Adam also received much infused science and wisdom while in the state of Innocence. After the Fall, although deprived of the Sanctifying Grace from which flowed the preternatural gifts such as freedom from sickness and death, Adam did not forget the immense fund of natural knowledge given him previously. For example, he must have had. a vast and intimate knowledge of the properties of plants, both as to their healing and their poisonous properties, for there is no other explanation of how this knowledge came to mankind than that it was given in the beginning. Surely he shared it with Eve and it may be that Eve herself was the recipient of such if not all of this same kind of knowledge especially in view of her role as help-mate and nurturer. Adam himself knew the most minute constituents of matter, and his knowledge, if revealed to us today, would certainly surpass that of the most advanced geneticists and physicists.
Scholars term this scientific knowledge that Adam transmitted to his descendants a “secular tradition”. It includes the centrality and immobility of the earth in the Universe, the four elements of the material creation (earth, air, fire and water) and the twelve signs of the Zodiac which provided the framework for the twelve months of the year, indicating the immense fund of astronomical and geophysical knowledge in this “secular tradition” of information and wisdom.
The Primordial Revelation along with Adam’s natural knowledge of the Earth and the Universe, was preserved in its purity and integrity by his sons in the line of Seth but was corrupted and put to profane and even evil use by the descendants of Cain.
Noah preserved this Primordial Tradition through the Flood in the Ark, whether in written or in memorable/oral form is not certain, but preserved it was until the time of the building of the Tower of Babel. The builders of this blasphemous structure were led by the Cainite rebel, Nimrod, a son of Tubalcain, the initiator of ancient technology. But Heber, the ancestor of Abraham and a son of Sem, retained the truth of Revelation, and from thence the treasure of religious and secular truth and knowledge became the exclusive patrimony of the Chosen people, the Hebrews. From them it came to Moses who committed the essentials to writing in the books known as the Pentateuch. These books, as well as others from the Old Testament, such as Tobias, contain much of the natural knowledge contained in the so-called “secular tradition”.
It was especially after the Dispersal from Babel that the Primordial Revelation was corrupted, for we see both vestigial hints of the great Truths and their gross distortions in the mythologies of Egypt, settled by the descendants of Ham (Cham) and Cush, of the Babylonians, the Phoenicians, the Atlanteans and the indigenous peoples of the New World – all descendants of the son of Noah called Ham.
The descendants of Japheth, Noah’s second son, developed the elaborate mythologies of the Nordic peoples, of the Celts and the Greeks. But all these mythologies contain traces of the Primordial Revelation glimpsed through the grossest of the deviant corruptions. (See this writer’s From the Beginning, Vol. II, for a more detailed tracing of these various mythological traditions.)
The Semites alone preserved the essentials of the Primordial Revelation in their integrity in the Books of Moses and the Prophets, that is, in what today we know as the Old Testament. But by Our Lord’s time, as He continually pointed out to the Pharisees and Sadducees, there was corruption of the original purity by man-made accretions that the Pharisees made for their own advantage (Cf. Mark 7:11) and much corruption of doctrine such as that of the Sadducees (Cf. Matt. 22:23).
The Incarnation
Now we come to the time of Our Lord and the founding of His Church upon the twelve Apostles with St. Peter as their Head. And front this time on, it is just as Hilaire Belloc says in his book on The Great Heresies:
… There is no such thing as a religion called “Christianity” – there never has been such a religion.
There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and Morals. But there never has been and never can be or will be a general Christian religion professed by men who all accept some central important doctrines, while agreeing to differ about others. There has always been, from the beginning, and will always be, the Church, and sundry heresies either doomed to decay, or, like Mohammedanism, to grow into a separate religion. Of a common Christianity there has never been and never can be a definition, for it has never existed. …
No; the quarrel is between the Church and the anti-Church – the Church of God and anti-God – the Church of Christ and anti-Christ. (p. 162) (emphases added)
The parallel is stunning between pagan, pre-Christian times and those following the establishment of the Church. There is the falling away from the Primordial Revelation by the makers (collective or individual or both) of the mythologies, and there is the falling away from the Church into heresy and apostasy by those unfaithful to the Deposit of Faith given to the Apostles.
Our Lord, fulfilling all the prophecies of the Promised Messiah, founded His church as the fulfillment and replacement of the Synagogue. The Church rose to a glorious pre- eminence in the Middle Ages, a time roughly analogous to the reigns of David and Solomon. But just as from Solomon’s son Rehoboam and the divided kingdom, Israel steadily declined, so too, as Father Denis Fahey has cogently observed and demonstrated, from the 13th century onwards it was all downhill.
The New World Perversion
Even more striking is the parallel between medieval Christendom and the “New World Order” so-called. This modern “global village” rivals in extent and certainly outdoes in material. prosperity the Ages of Faith. But whereas the Catholic Faith was the driving force and formal principle of Christendom, the One World dis-order of today is driven and formally defined by the idea that mankind has finally “come of age” emerging into his maturity out of the ages of infantile and adolescent dependence and superstition. Because he sees himself as supremely capable and even obliged now in his new-found adulthood to govern himself, there has arisen the goal of an absolute egalitarianism proclaimed in a democratic form of government and society mandatory for all peoples.
Such a view of man and his nature is based upon the humanistic ideal of absolute autonomy from any Supreme Being, for man himself is now seen as the creator and determiner of his own evolutionary destiny.
There is the constant insistence upon man’s egalitarian relationship to the animals, for truly, according to his mentor/priests, the scientists, man is made NOT in the image and likeness of the God Who formed him from the slime of the Earth, but rather, he is made in the image and likeness of the beasts from which he is said to have evolved.
Today’s world, in its religion, in its politics which insists upon toleration of all but the intolerant, and in its sciences, is ruled and strictly dominated by the ideology of Evolution, spiritual as well as physical, the religions of the East adding the main characteristics of the spiritual dimension.
This modern evolutionary world view is only paralleled in history, in its extent and in its force, by the Catholic Faith of the Middle Ages. And just as the true Church was the mainspring of the Faith of Christendom with its orderly hierarchical and monarchical society, so today, the Conciliar Church, by making itself the Repository of every religious sentiment and setting itself to falsify Belloc’s assertion of an essential dogmatic truth,[1] becomes the hidden mainspring of the New One-World Religion which gives life and force to the New One World-Global Perversion. This false Church is the harlot-Bride of the Anti-Christ.
The evolutionary world view, espoused by this harlot Church, stretches from the Big-Bang billions of years ago into infinity, thereby trashing the true Biblical-Catholic world view which sees time as stretching from Creation ex nihilo not more than ten thousand years ago to the Last Judgment when Our Lord Jesus Christ will come again to judge the living and the dead. Dies Irae…
These very striking parallels and perversions seem quite plainly to indicate, all Traditional teachings considered, that the Last Judgment may be imminent, or, at most, but a few decades into the future. In any case, Our Lord has warned us to be sober and vigilant, to watch and to pray. Above all, to pray.
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Paula Haigh l Nazareth Village I - #102 l POB 1000 l Nazareth KY 40048-1000 l USA
[1] This quotation from Belloc, even though it enunciates a dogmatic truth, also represents that “triumphalism” so lamented by Novus Ordo Catholics. I believe this kind of attitude was due to the separation of the Church from Her roots in Scripture and Tradition, a separation manifested clearly in Belloc’s dismissal of Genesis as “Hebrew folklore”. (See this writer’s paper on “Some Catholic Intellectuals and Evolution.”).