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[+] HONOURING OUR SONS, THE QUEEN'S COMMONWEALTH SOLDIERS KILLED IN THE 'WAR ON TERROR'

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Wednesday, October 05, 2005
God is an Englishman

In his famous 1970 novel, God is an Englishman, R.F. Delderfield spoke metaphorically about the extraordinary entrepreneurial progress and industrial transformation of Britain during the Victorian era; a period during which British wealth and power rose to its zenith, when a full quarter of the world’s population fell under the civilising dominion of Anglo-imperial rule; when a people “relative to their numbers, contributed more to civilisation than any other people since the ancient Greeks and Romans”. With Pax Britannica and preconceived notions of greatness still fresh in the minds of a people who witnessed it, small wonder the ageing Victorian romantic was not only irresistibly drawn to the author’s work, but to an unembroidered interpretation of it. To Churchill’s generation, God was an Englishman.

While I can empathize with the merits of this partly conceited Anglo-Saxon point of view, and I fervently hope the book will one day find a prominent place in my proud collection, such a belief does regrettably possess a minor logical drawback: all Englishmen are natural subjects of Her Majesty, a detail that turns on its head the ancient conviction that monarchs derive their due authority from the Deity.

Quite obviously this cannot be, since the consequence of believing so would upset our whole civilising experience, where the two most reverent and exalted of earthly institutions – monarchy and the church – would no longer be ordered on mortal man’s deference to God. Kings are not gods - they are servants. Our love for the majesty of kings is dependent on them serving us and serving Him. "God creates the world out of nothing. God creates man out of the ground. God creates woman from man...God gives them a king". Evidently, God is a monarchist.

God is an Englishman? Yes, tongue-in-cheek. God is a monarchist? Yes. No tongue. No cheek.

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