"It is not the problem of giving up the faith, but the problem of giving up the fight, that is the one genuine difficulty from the old guard of the Orange tradition. But the English cannot comprehend people having come to love the fight for its own sake, or merely because it is a story. He asks what people are fighting about and does not realise that they are fighting about the story of the fight. That self-renewing romance or nightmare, as we happen to regard it, is the soul and immorality of the feud. To the English the feud would be nightmare, but to some at least of the Irish, the feud has been almost fairy tale." — G.K. Chesterton, The Orangeman and the Englishman, 1921
God has engrafted enmity into every story. Since the Fall, God has seen fit to frame the future in terms of impostion with the seed of Eve and the seed of the serpent perpetually at odds. Fighting, in other words, is inescapable. You cannot not fight. To conscientiously object is to join the side of the serpent. God accepts no ceasefires, but Satan is often proposing them, as losing sides are often want to do. But there can be no peace with evil until it is eradicated. Those who fail to understand the joy of the fight fail to grasp the fun of the story we are in.
"The full value of this life can only be got by fighting; the violent take it by storm. And if we have accepted everything we have missed something -- war. This life of ours is a very enjoyable fight, but a very miserable truce." — G.K. Chesterton
Because God is good and a perfect Author, our stories are full of conflict. These adventures are are joy to endure, but a hell if avoided. Life is a miserable truce. If you make your peace with evil, you will never know the vitality of dying for goodness's sake. Beds of ease make for eternal difficulties.
"The history of the world since that time {Genesis 3) has been a struggle between the seed of the serpent and the seed of the woman. The antipathy between them is settled and nothing can be done about it. People can switch sides, but they cannot make the two sides one. There is a final and complete enmity between the seed of the woman and the seed of the serpent. The nature of this ongoing struggle is two-fold. One is the active struggle itself, and the other is the battle over the narrative. The first concerns the armies on the field, and the second concerns what we might call 'the media.' There is fighting, and then there is the narrative about the fighting. Who wins the battle, and who controls the narrative? The answers to these questions are not always the same." — Douglas Wilson, Mere Fundamentalism
Faith is the active struggle of life against death, goodness against evil, the joy of the Lord against the drugs of the Devil, the glory of God against the dinge of the darkness.
The feud is a fairy tale to the faithful and a nightmare to the nominal. The battle is the banner of the brave and the bane of the bland. The fight is the faith and the faith is the fight.
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