T.R. Rex on Barbaric Virtues.

On my journeys today, I found that I had a $25.00 Barnes & Noble gift card in my wallet.  Bet you can't guess where I went after that!  I successfully found two books and cannot wait to read them.

The First is Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation, by Cokie Roberts.  I found it to be interesting, because not much is said about the women who backed the founding fathers, and from what I have read already, she seems to be quite a good author.

Secondly, I found Theodore Roosevelt's History of the United States: His Own Words, Selected and arranged by Daniel Ruddy

T.R. Rex is such a boss.

And an excerpt will be all you need to like this book:

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of virile fighting virtues, of the fighting edge.  When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always a danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fiber. The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose. Unless we keep the barbarian virtues, gaining the civilized ones will be of little avail. Oversentimentality, over-softness, washiness, and mushiness are the great dangers of this age and of this people. 

Peace is not the end. Righteousness is the end. When the Savior saw the money-changers in the Temple he broke the peace by driving them out. At that moment peace could have been obtained readily enough by the simple process of keeping quiet in the presence of wrong. But instead of preserving the peace at the expense of righteousness, the Savior armed himself with a scourge of chords and drove the money changers from the temple.

I do not want to see Christianity professed only by weaklings. I want to see it a moving spirit among men of strength. The non-resistance of the Christians in Quo Vadis made me so angry! The non-resistance of good people always does.  Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought. If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to and including the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would be at this moment Mohammedan, and  and the Christian religion would be exterminated.  From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could and would fight as well as the Mohammedan agressor.

Does militant Christianity scare you? It shouldn't, if you are Christ's. We wage a war of a different kind. We defend our faith with swords only when necessary. Some things seem too strange or cruel to make sense. No sense in the Bible, nor in the real world, but that never has stopped them from their being true. Facts are facts. Cruelty is cruelty, but thank God that we have a new weapon, the weapon that kills the sin, plucks the root, instead of ignore, leave out, and turn away the sinner. We have been given a weapon that will crush the hearts of the cruelest tyrants. God has given his people grace. He has given His son the kingdom which is the earth and heaven, and He rules it.

I pray that you be courageous. Fear God. & Fear Nought.