“The Son of the Highest, the great self-sacrificing Non-Resistant, is our prophet, priest, and king. Though the maddened inhabitants of the earth have so long turned a deaf ear to his voice, he shall yet be heard. He declares that good is the only antagonist of evil which can conquer the deadly foe. Therefore he enjoins on his disciples the duty of resisting evil only with good.”
— Adin Ballou, Christian Non-Resistance
Beware of men in suits, my son;
Trust not thyself to a woman in heels:
Whose hope is in the gleaming, glittering hoard;
Whose souls were long since traded on exchange,
Bought and sold
For silver and gold.
Follow them not down plushy corridors,
Through halls of vain regard and empty praise,
Up glassed and brassy steps to penthouse peaks,
Lush with cool-roof chambers,
Void of cheer,
Smooth and sleek with stain of dark veneer.
Beware of him whose name is on the door,
Keep watch on her who sits enthroned within,
Whose tongues like cooing birds behind their hands
Sift lies through smiles
And whispering wiles
And falter not while hope of conquest stands.
Beware! Their dewlapped hearts are far from thee,
Enwrapped in bills and bonds and shares and notes,
Blanketed and muffled to the ears
Against thy sad and solitary cry.
Not fallen earth
Nor barren birth
Can move them to the brink of bitter tears.
Be not deceived nor follow in their way;
Forgo their cocktails, shun their happy hours.
No longer do they mind the soul’s bright spring:
They weep not with the dew
Nor shiver with the rain
Nor tremble with the leaf nor feel the pain.
Forsake the stocking sheer, the silken tie;
Return to the soil and taste the tang of earth.
Put hand to plough, face front and trace thy furrow,
Reclaim the dark and fecund fertile land.
Plant thy seed
Against thy need
And look not back where whitening pillars stand.
“The notion that this world, and the powers of it, are in the grip of evil, is too well established in Christian teaching to be lightly disregarded …
“By ‘the world’ I mean what the Church has always meant by ‘the world’ — and this surely includes the official and respectable earthly set-up, the thing ruled over by the Powers-that-be; indeed (there is no escaping the word) what we now call ‘the Establishment.’ This needs to be said, for we have now sufficiently secularized our minds to be in the habit of viewing the social and political set-up in which we are involved as something wholly, or largely, good in the eyes of God …
“… The Church can never truly ally itself either with our materialistic Conservatism or our materialistic Socialism. For the Church is up against the Establishment. It always was.”
— Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind
