The scene is the castle of the Duke of Northumberland. The Duke has been feigning illness to excuse himself from joining the revolt of his son, Harry Percy, called Hotspur for his impetuosity, against the throne of King Henry IV. But we cannot attribute his inaction to loyalty to the King, or to moral scruples. Northumberland was the ladder wherewithal the ambitious Henry deposed his cousin Richard and ascended the throne in the first place.

There is no enemy worse than a political ally disappointed in his hopes to gain from the man he has elevated to power. Northumberland and his kinsmen have egged on the quick-tempered Hotspur to his rash military venture. Too rash, it appears; and that’s why the nervous Duke has stayed home. Now comes word of the event. Hotspur has been slain in battle. The rebel armies have been driven from the field, and the king’s forces are now on the march toward Northumberland.

The Duke tosses aside his crutch and his nightcap, and pitches himself into fury:

Now bind my brows with iron, and approach

The ragged’st hour that time and spite dare bring

To frown upon the enraged Northumberland!

Let heaven kiss earth! Now let not nature’s hand

Keep the wild flood confined! Let order die!

And let this world no longer be a stage

To feed contention in a lingering act!

But let one spirit of the first-born Cain

Reign in all bosoms, that, each heart being set,

On bloody courses, the rude scene may end,

And darkness be the burier of the dead!

And that is Shakespeare’s cue to us, in Henry IV, part two, that Northumberland and his fellows are quite insane, despite their usually cool heads, their Machiavellian calculations, and their obvious intelligence.

Let order die. A friend of mine once said to me that they were the most sinister words Shakespeare ever wrote. I am inclined to agree. They express more than a desire to overturn a political arrangement. They are essentially suicidal, nihilistic. Chesterton once said that suicide is in this sense more desperately wicked than murder. The murderer kills a man; he says no to that one human life. The suicide says no to the universe.

We are in the midst of people now who say, in one fashion or another, Let order die – who say no to the universe. Many are like Northumberland, who is learning to his dismay that one Machiavellian had better not trust another; whose own moral failings have led to his son’s death, and who cannot admit it. It would be better for the nation to be thrust into civil war, better for Cain the fratricide to reign in every man’s heart, better for universal darkness to fall, than for him to say, “Lord, against thee, against thee only have I sinned.”

Such people are moved by resentment against a good they have rejected, and find, in rejecting it, no peace, but a remorse they cannot drive out, and a hotter and hotter desire to ruin what is left of that good, so that no one will be able to enjoy what they cannot enjoy. It is hard for ordinary people – people who respond with gratitude to the order of nature – to understand this.

When an ordinary person beholds a work of “art” in a public place, a hulking tangle of metal that looks like the droppings of some gigantic android (I’ve seen such a work, in Los Angeles), he’s apt to give the “artist” the benefit of the doubt. He will say, “I don’t like it, but maybe there’s something to it that I don’t understand.”

It doesn’t occur to him that anyone would want to make ugly things, to offend or to nauseate. He can no more imagine it than he can imagine wishing that everything he sees and hears – the finches trilling in the trees, the puffs of cloud in the sky above, the pleasant friend walking beside him – were buried in darkness.

When an ordinary person walks into a church whose most prominent features are the rivets in the joists overhead, whose Stations of the Cross are so small and so far away from the pews as to be specks, and whose sanctuary has been replaced by a clearing for getting to the back doors (I have seen many such churches), he’s apt to say, “I don’t like it, but maybe there’s something to it that I don’t understand.”

It doesn’t occur to him that anyone would want to build a church to stifle the sense of the holy. He can no more imagine that than he can imagine wishing that there were no God, and no meaning to human life.

When an ordinary person sees a lad and lass holding hands, it cheers him. He cannot imagine why anybody would not be cheered. When an ordinary person meets a young wife and her three children running and hollering across the playground, he smiles. He cannot imagine why anybody would wish there were fewer of those children, or none.

When an ordinary person sees someone saying grace at a restaurant, it embarrasses him, not because they’re saying grace, but because he forgot to. He cannot imagine anyone being offended by it. An ordinary person sees the cross of iron girders left in the destruction of the World Trade Center, and feels a shiver of awe. He cannot imagine why anyone would hate it, and want it destroyed.

The ordinary healthy person cannot imagine what it is to be sick. He cannot imagine wanting to destroy for the sake of destroying. He thinks he can reason with the destroyers.

Well, maybe so; it depends on the destroyer and the extent of the sickness. But ultimately that ordinary person will have to peer into the darkness, and admit that he is fighting against powers and principalities. “Evil be thou my good,” says Milton’s Satan. Let order die.