Tales for Our Time is a unique feature of The Mark Steyn Club - and, I'm pleased to say, one of our most popular: our nightly audio serialisations of classic literature from Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, via some neglected but highly pertinent gems such as Conan Doyle's tale of proto-jihadists preying on foolish westerners, The Tragedy of the Korosko.
Our current caper is Lord of the World, a far-sighted novel of 1907 by Robert Hugh Benson about the world of the early twenty-first century - when the secular utopia has arrived. In tonight's episode the remnants of western Christianity are feeling the pressure:
In Paris forty of the new-born Order had been burned alive in one day in the Latin quarter, before the Government intervened. From Spain, Holland, Russia had come in other names. In Dusseldorf eighteen men and boys, surprised at their singing of Prime in the church of Saint Laurence, had been cast down one by one into the city-sewer, each chanting as he vanished:
"Christi Fili Dei vivi miserere nobis,"
and from the darkness had come up the same broken song till it was silenced with stones.
Members of The Mark Steyn Club can hear me read Part Twenty-One of our tale simply by clicking here and logging-in. Earlier episodes can be found here.
I'll be right back here tomorrow with Part Twenty-Two of Lord of the World. If you're minded to join us in The Mark Steyn Club in this our eighth season, you're more than welcome. You can find more information here. And, if you have a chum you think might enjoy Tales for Our Time (so far, we've covered H G Wells, P G Wodehouse, Dickens, Conrad, Kipling, Kafka, Gogol, Baroness Orczy, Victor Hugo, Louisa May Alcott, O Henry, John Buchan, Scott Fitzgerald and more), we have a special Gift Membership that makes a perfect Valentine's present.
