What Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'The Gray Champion' Can Teach Us Today

“Oh! Lord of Hosts,” cried a voice among the crowd, “provide a Champion for thy people!”

The nameless voice in the 1689 Boston crowd prays, in the short story ‘The Gray Champion,’ as men have entreated God in earlier times, as well as in the times since Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in 1835, including the present.

So Nikki Haley announces her candidacy for the American presidency in 2024, joining Trump as a contender on the Republican side. Are either of them the answer to this ask of a Champion, or will anyone else be?

It’s impossible to say as yet. Meanwhile, most of us are mulling over for various reasons such oddities as our military and political leaders assuring us that they’re not saying it’s aliens they’re shooting at in our airspace. Therefore some conclude that it’s definitely aliens, as should surprise no one. And, for what it’s worth, C.S. Lewis would have been generally open to that possibility. Yet that does not lend any more or less credibility to my own suspicions of misdirection and reverse psychology.

Either way, for my part, the rate of inflation month over month is more concerning, or at least equally a cause for concern, where the ability of Americans to get off the ground depends on sound money, as well as a sound economy. But perhaps I repeat myself.

Where the lattermost is concerned, Ron DeSantis is doing the Lord’s work, moving against ESG investment funds in the state of Florida. So also on the former item, since inflation has to do with more than just increasing the supply of dollars in the economy, as the supply of money relative the supply of goods and services is more on the nose. ESG investment promises to give us less for more, until we all, as promised, own nothing and are happy. Thus I file the move against woke hedge funds under the heading ‘every little bit helps.’

On that note, who were the British monarchs in power around the time in which Hawthorne’s story was set? And why was the Almighty petitioned for an intercessor who would deliver the colonial Bostonians from their enemies – even those who acted in the name and authority of the crown? And why was Nathaniel Hawthorne, a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln, thinking so long and hard about the plight of Americans in 1689 anyway?

Perhaps we do well to brush up on our history, as Twice-Told Tales would beckon us to, and pray that the Lord of Hosts would provide a champion for His people again.

Then again, in another sense, He already has, for all times and circumstances, in Christ Jesus. Yet there is no need for mutual exclusion where the salvation of our souls is held in the one hand, but a temporal and human of good character might be asked and hoped for. The good Lord did create us with two hands, after all.

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