PART 9
By
Pastor Roger Anghis
April 11, 2010
NewsWithViews.com
Their Law
As we continue in our study of how the Bible influenced the lives of our Founding Fathers AND the establishing of our government, in review, we have seen how the Bible influenced their learning by being THE text that all of our Founding Fathers were educated with and we saw how, through their own words, the moral concepts of the Bible directed everything that they did. I now want to look to see the place that the Bible is given in the legal profession.
James Wilson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a signer of the Constitution (there were only 6 who signed both), and was the second most active member at the Constitutional Convention speaking 168 times. After the signing of the Constitution, President Washington placed him as an original justice of the Supreme Court. This only seems just having one that helped draft the Constitution be a member of the Court that interprets the Constitutional intent. He was the first one that came up with the idea of formal legal training in America.
Up to this time you simply worked with an attorney as an apprentice and after a few years, you took the bar exam. He wrote the first legal texts that were used in the first legal schools in America. In his writings he taught that you not only had to understand civil law, you had to understand the basis of civil law. He states that civil law MUST rest on that law which is divine. He concluded that: “Far from being rivals, religion and law are twin sisters.” It is the Bible that was the basis for the civil laws of the United States.
1801 is when Fisher Ames, the author of the 1st Amendment, the Amendment the courts have used to declare separation of church and state, wrote an article about the state of affairs of the public school system: “It has been the custom of late years to put a number of little books into the hands of children containing fables and moral lessons, This is very well because it is good to raise curiosity and then to guide it, but too much time is being spent on these ‘frothy’ texts and not enough time is being spent on the Bible. The chief textbook in our schools should be the Bible.
Why, then, if these new books should be retained, as they will be, why should not the Bible retain the position it once held. Its morals are pure; its examples are captivating and noble. The reverence for the sacred Book that is early impressed lasts long and probably if not impressed in infancy, never take firm hold of the mind.” Where can a concept like this be validated in scripture? Proverbs 22:6 “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” Here is the author of the 1st Amendment, the Amendment that our courts of today have used to remove the Bible from the classroom, declaring that the Bible is the best textbook for morals, the best source of instruction and language and general learning.
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Elias Boudinot was the president of Congress during the American Revolution and in 1801 he wrote a book titled ‘The Age of Revelation’. ‘For nearly half a century I’ve anxiously and critically studied the Bible and I still scarcely ever take it up that I fail to find something new. Were you to ask me to recommend to you the most valuable book in the world, I should fix on the Bible as the most instructive both to the wise and to the ignorant. Were you to ask me for the book with the most rational and pleasing entertainment to the inquiring mind, I would still say the Bible. And if should ask again for the best philosophy or the most interesting history, I would still urge you to look into your Bible. I would make it, in short, the alpha and omega of knowledge.” This is from one of our most active Founding Fathers. After he served as president of Congress, he went into the 1st Congress and helped frame the Bill of Rights, including the 1st Amendment. This statement from one of the co-authors of the 1st Amendment assures us that the Bible should be allowed in schools as a learning text and not just for its historical facts.
This last week our Supreme Court rejected a case where the Jewish Menorah and the Islamic star and crescent could be displayed during Christmas in New York State public schools, but not the Nativity scene. We have gone a long ways down the wrong road and we must stop and regain the footing that the church once had in this nation. Scripture has warned us about going down this road: Hosea 4:6 “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge: because thou hast rejected knowledge, I will also reject thee, that thou shalt be no priest to me: seeing thou hast forgotten the law of thy God, I will also forget thy children.”
In 1808 Benjamin Rush, we’ve spoke of him earlier concerning the Sunday School movement in 1791, and his belief that all schools should have the Bible as the main teaching text, founded the first American Bible Society who’s goal was to put the Bible into the hands of every person in America. This is significant because you will see that within the next eight years 121 Bible societies were started in America. Many of these societies were started by our Founding Fathers, you know, the atheists and agnostic and deist Founding Fathers that did not believe in God, did not believe that religion should be part of everyday life, James McHenry, a signer of the Constitution, and Secretary of War. You may recognize that name because of Fort McHenry. That was the fort where Francis Scott Key saw that the flag was still flying after a night of severe naval bombardment and inspired him to write the Star Spangled Banner.
McHenry started what is today called the Baltimore Bible society. He believed that the Bible was the best security for the government that he had helped create. “The Holy Scriptures can alone secure to society order and peace. And to our courts of justice and constitutions of governments purity, stability and usefulness. In vain, without the Bible, we increase our penal laws and draw protections around our institutions.” He believed that unless we lived as a society, by the Word of God, we could not pass enough laws to protect us from what man will tend to drift towards when left to his own will and emotions. We are seeing that prediction play out today.
What we see today is exactly what he was talking about. When we began to take God out of the schools, out of the workplace, out of government, we began to see more and more laws passed to protect society from itself. In Texas, the Governor has called for all girls from the age of 12 to be ‘vaccinated’ for a sexually transmitted disease. Parents have no say in the matter; it is required by the state. Why is this? Because we have accepted the behavior of premarital sex even to age of 12 years old!!! We have ignored God’s laws and have enacted our own to take its place, but it is too little too late, not to mention totally ineffective.
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Our Nation began as a society that lived by the Word of God and to continue to prosper as they did, we have to do what they did, live by the Word of God. If we won’t, we will forfeit our rights, our health, our prosperity, our heritage and our nation.
Click here for part -----> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
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Pastor Roger Anghis is the Founder of RestoreFreeSpeech.org, an organization designed to draw attention to the need of returning free speech rights to churches that was restricted in 1954.
President of The Damascus Project, TheDamascusProject.org, which has a stated purpose of teaching pastors and lay people the need of the churches involvement in the political arena and to teach the historical role of Christianity in the politics of the United States. Married-37 years, 3 children, three grandchildren.
Web site: RestoreFeeSpeech.org
E-Mail: editor@restorefreespeech.org
