Streams of tears flow from my eyes, for your law is not obeyed. Psalm 119:136

Ken Myers, in an essay entited "Discerning The Barbarians" addresses the decay of culture and the decline of the west. In doing so he recalls the prophetic point of view of T. S. Elliot...

"Elliot rejected the sort of cultural relativism which is now the accepted wisdom of the modern academy. He believed that 'the most important question that we can ask is whether there is any permanent standard by which we can compare one civilization with another, and by which we can make some guess at the improvement or decline of our own.'

'We have to admit, in comparing one civilization with another, and in comparing the different stages of our won, that no one society and no one age of it realizes all the values of civilization….'

'We can distinguish between higher and lower cultures; we can distinguish between advance and retrogression. We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.'

'I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed further, and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have not culture. Then culture will have to grow again from the soil; and when I say it must grow again from the soil, I do not mean that it will be brought into existence by any activity of political demagogues.' 

Myers in his own thoughts continues, "I believe that Eliot is right about the long process necessary to recover civilization, and I have to ask whether the church in this twilight time is vigorously preparing its children for the responsibilities ahead."

"It may be attractive to retool Christianity to make it more barbarian-friendly, but I don’t believe it’s a way to love God or neighbor, and to care for coming generations."

"It’s important to remember that the claim that our civilization is collapsing is not simply a judgment made from totaling up statistics on violent crime of the frequency of divorce or compiling anecdotes about juvenile delinquency."

"These problems are symptoms that something is wrong, but not necessarily symptoms that our civilization is disappearing. What makes it seem certain that the Western tradition is dying is the way those in authority (in government, education, the media, and the professions) explain and try to address these problems."

"What is missing from nearly all public responses to public crises are arguments relation the symptoms to basic moral principles. Whenever these problems are seen as having simply economic or therapeutic remedies, whenever their essential moral significance is denied, the Western way is smothered."

"When it becomes impossible to conduct extended public discussion about sexually transmitted diseases, or homosexuality, or abortion as moral issues, the Western view of man as a moral creature and of society as a moral order is denied."

"In the early 1930’s, the Reformed theologian and churchman J. Gresham Machen published an essay called 'Mountains and Why We Love Them.' Machen, the founder of Westminster Theological Seminary, had returned from a visit to Europe, during which he spent some time hiking in the Alps. Machen had been very moved as he stood on the Matterhorn, observing the landscape before him, aware of what that land represented.

'You are standing there not in any ordinary country, but in the very midst of Europe, looking out  from its very center. Germany just beyond where you can see the northeast, Italy to the south, France beyond those snows of Mount Blanc.'

'There, in that glorious round spread out before you, that land of Europe, humanity has put forth its best. There it has struggled; there it has fallen; there it has looked upward to God.'

'The history of the race seems to pass before you in an instant of time, concentrated in that fairest of all lands of Earth. You think of the great men whose memories you love, the men who have struggled for light and freedom, struggled for beauty, struggled above all for God’s Word.'

'And then you think of the present and its decadence and its slavery, and you desire to weep. It is a pathetic thing to contemplate the history of mankind.”

"Machen understood the tragedy of his time in way few of us do today. And he knew that such sentiments were likely to be pooh-poohed. 'I know that there are people who tell us contemptuously that there are always croakers who look to the past, croakers who think that the good old times are the best.'

'But I for my part refuse to acquiesce in this relativism which refused to take stock of the times in which we are living. It does seem to me that there can never be any true advance, and above all there can never be any true prayer, unless a man does pause occasionally, as on some mountain vantage ground, to try, at least, to evaluate the age in which we are living.'

"....men of Issachar, who understood the times and knew what Israel should do...  1 Chronicles 12:32

'And when I do that, I cannot for the life of me see how any man with even the slightest knowledge of history can help recognizing the fact that we are living in a time of sad decadence – a decadence only thinly disguised by the material achievements of our age, which already are beginning to pall on us like a new toy.'

Myers continues: "Machen knew that like obedience, prayer requires an understanding of the context. He knew that we could not represent the Gospel in our time without understanding the meaning of our moment. He knew that we could not resist worldliness without understanding something of the trajectory of the world’s ways. He knew that we could not be faithful to the city of God if we were ignorant about who and what was governing the city of man."