Someone with whom I was recently arguing* said:

if I had to choose between liberalism or Islam ruling the world, I would choose Islam.

Which is as much as saying:

if I had to choose between being guillotined or being decapitated with a scimitar, I would choose the scimitar.

As a Restorationist, I prefer to keep my head, as I sometimes find it useful. If I do lose it, I hope to lose it battle for the defense of Emperor, Christendom, and freedom or failing that by dying a martyr. A martyr does not choose death, rather, he chooses Christ and is killed for his choice. Indeed very much the same point was made by Chesterton at the end of an essay, appropriately named, On Losing One’s Head, if one substitutes “Liberal” and Muslim for anarchist and sophist:

The separation of body and head is a sort of symbol of that separation of body and soul which is made by all the heresies and the sophistries, which are the nightmares of the mind. The mere materialist is a body that has lost its head; the mere spiritualist is a head that has mislaid its body. Under the same symbol can be found the old distinction between the sinner and the heretic about which theology has uttered many paradoxes, more profitable to study than some modern people fancy. For there is one kind of man who takes off his head and throws it in the gutter, who dethrones and forgets the reason that should be his ruler and witness; and the horrible headless body strides away over cities and sanctuaries, breaking them down and treading them into mire and blood. He is the criminal; but there is another figure equally sinister and strange. This man forgets his body, with all its instinctive honesties and recurrent sanities and laws of God; he leaves his body working in the fields like a slave; and the head goes away to think alone. The head, detached and dehumanized, thinks faster and faster like a clock gone mad; it is never heated by any generous blood, never softened by any healthy fatigue, never checked or warned by any of the terrible tocsins of instinct. The head thinks because it cannot do anything else; because it cannot feel or doubt or know. This man is the heretic; and in this way all the heresies were made. The anarchist goes off his head and the sophist goes off his body; I will not renew the old dispute about which is the worse amputation; but I should recommend the prudent reader to avoid both.

*Out of fairness to the individual I am withholding his identity and where he said what I now quote. Some of you may know already.