Be Glad They Fought
As an exercise of the right-use of imagination, picture flying the old ‘Stars-and-Bars’ rebel flag; perhaps on a t-shirt, in an office, or on a dorm-room wall. You know what it means; but lets say someone just had a few tall glasses of fluoride coffee with extra soy milk and decides to remark on your beloved banner. You can easily predict what the first thing they will call you is. I hardly have to mention it; and I won’t because the concept is made up by the same ones who destroyed the last great empire of the world a little more than one hundred years ago. The second thing that they will say is often something like this.
“Well, you guys lost!”
Should this happen to you, trust in discernment and wisdom from God to guide you. And yet, I anticipate that many a calm, peaceable, and level-headed man will not lose an easy mind in giving a well-thought-out strike to the mouth.
Behind closed doors, however, I believe each man wishes they hadn’t. This is good, but we must remember providence! God’s hand is in all things, and what man means for evil, God useth for good! We should be glad that they fought, as with the Loyalists, the Jacobites, the Cavaliers, the White Russians, the counter-revolutionaries at the Vendée. We should be glad for the same reason we are glad for Columbus, Cortes, and Constantine; because we understand that, as with all those conflicts, the fight for the South did not end at Appomattox. The fight for the South, the fight for merry England, for France, for Byzantium, for Vietnam, for Russia and all the souls in the whole world does not end until the trumpet is sounded and the Son of Man cometh down just as he had gone up. “Cometh the hour, cometh the man.”
We must be glad they fought. We must be glad that even thousands of miles and thousands of years from where Christ walked and talked and taught and died and rose, and even after centuries of schism upon schism left them so seemingly far from the church, those men fought for God against Mammon. It was Rome against Carthage once again in such a manner that is impossible to claim coincidence. We can make the connection with precision, understanding the symbolic role of the South and the love for Christ amongst its forces and folk without having any affection for republican or democratic governments or the American Revolution of 1776. Many Southerners admired these, but we know better by the Grace of God.
Once we are glad for those who resisted evil before us, we can seek to emulate them. We must not fear anything except to lose the friendship of God. This is both happy and hard. It is hard to have no fear and yet also it is a wonderful thing to be free of it. Thankfully, we have generations of well-adjusted, easy-minded, and brave folk to look back on as an example for life; the saints. And for those outside the church, but still having lived good lives that revealed something of God, we can emulate that in their life which is good.
Be glad they fought! And continue the fight.