"FAREWELL, DEAR ENGLAND" - CHAPTER # 4

"FAREWELL, DEAR ENGLAND" - CHAPTER # 4 !!!
Francis Higginson gathered his wife and eight children on the deck of their departing ship to watch the English coastline disappear over the distant horizon. "Farewell, dear Enland," he cried, "and all the Christian friends there!" Higginson and his family were among the first of a colossal wave of Puritan emigrants who followed the Pilgrims from England to distant America in the 1630s. "Our heads and hearts," wrote one to those left behind, "shall be fountains of tears for your everlasting welfare, when we shall be in our poor cottages in the wilderness." In extraordinary numbers, England's Puritans abandoned the familiar surroundings of the Old World and set their faces toward the New. An initial surge brought two hundred emigrants to New England's Massachusetts Bay in 1630. It was followed by eight hundred more. Then another seven hundred arrived. Then three thousand in a single year__as ship after ship spilled these devout people of the Book onto the wilderness shores of New England.
# 2 -  Never had England recorded such an exodus of its people. They did not come in a single weather-beaten vessel, as did the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower. Instead, they were ferried across the Atlantic in fleets__seventeen ships transported one thousand passengers at one point. In a single decade, from 1630 to 1640, more than twenty thousand English Puritans immigrated to Massachusetts Bay Colony. So massive was the transfer of population that it became known as "the Great Migration"__and it would mold the culture of America in a mighty way. Who were these Puritan people? And why did they leave England in such a mass immigration? 
# 3 - The name "Puritan" was originally a term of ridicule__applied to Christians who wanted to purify the Church of England of practices they deemed unbiblical. Their concerns were rooted in the Protestant Reformation. In 1517, Martin Luther, a Roman Catholic priest in Germany, had spoken the Reformation by calling for the Church to return to key biblical doctrines distorted or abandoned in the early Middle Ages. Luther and other Reformers preached salvation by God's grace through faith in Jesus Christ alone, rather than by a combination of faith and human works. They proclaimed the "priesthood of believers," teaching that any Christian should be able to read the Bible without the oversight of a minister or priest. They upheld the authority of the Bible over Church tradition and papal rulings, and they denounced the Church would lessen the punishment for sin in the afterlife. 

CHAPTER # 3 - "ONE SMALL CANDLE"

CHAPTER # 3 - "ONE SMALL CANDLE" _# 1 __On November 9, 1620, the passengers and crew of the Mayflower looked across the gray waters of the Atlantic at the forested shore of New England__and claimed by the colony of Virginia. Like the Jamestown colonists, they too had a charter from the London Company to establish a colony on Virginia's northern rim. Following a fierce Atlantic storm, however, they would up off the coast of what would become Massachusetts. Realizing their error, they headed down the coast for their intended destination, but off Cape Cod's eastern shore they were stopped by dangerous shoals and rough seas. They had already endured a grueling two-months voyage and a storm so ferocious that it cracked the Mayflower's main beam. Had they not rigged a make-shift repair they might have been doomed.  
# 2 __They had survived, they believe, only by the grace of God. "In sundrie of these storms the winds were so fierce & the seas so high," one of them would later recall, "[and] they comited themselves to the will of God. . . ." Faced now with more rough seas, they abandoned attempts to reach their intended destination in Virginia. Although outside the jurisdiction of their charater, they decided to establish their colony where they had made landfall__on the coast of Massachusetts. After anchoring in Cape Cod Bay, off the site of modern Provincetown, they moved across the bay to the place where they would make their home. They would call it Plymouth Colony, and they would eventually become known as the Pilgrims. Plymouth Colony would prove to be the second successful England colony in America__and it too would be faith-based.
# 3 __"Being thus arrived in a good harbor and brought safe to land," Pilgrim leader William Bradford would report, "they fell upon their kness & blessed the God of heaven, who had brought them over the vast & furious ocean, and delivered them from all the periles & miseries thereof, againe to set their feet on the firme and stable earth. . ." Bradford and about a third of the Mayflower's 102 passengers belonged to a Puritan sect known as Separatists__and they were the driving force behind the expedition and its vision for a colony in America. The tumultuous Atlantic waves were not the only "periles & miseries" the Plymouth Separatists had face: they had come to the New World wilderness to establish a Christian safe haven from forces they feared in Europe.
# 4 __English Separatists were so named because they had separated from the official state denomination__the Church of England__and no longer considered themselves Anglicans. Theologically, the Church of England held to the fundamental doctrines of the Protestant Reformation, but it had retained distinctive elements of Catholic worship. Mainstream Puritans wanted the Anglican Church to purify itself of all remnants of Catholicism, but they kept their church membership. Separatists, however, believed every local church should be independent and self-governing. That position was illegal under English's uniformity Act of 1559, and was punishable by fines and imprisonment__or worse. Early Separatist leaders had been executed in England, and sect members had suffered ridicule, threats, and persecution.
# 5 __Scores of Separatists had fled to the Netherlands, where religious freedom was allowed. After years in a foreign land, however, some had begun to worry that their children were losing their English heritage. They had also begun to fear that political changes between the Netherlands and Spain might land them under control of Catholic Spain, which had executed thousands of Protestants a generation earlier. In 1617, members of a Separatist congregation in the Dutch city of Leiden prayerfully decided to seek a new life in the New World__where they could live their faith without persecution. Encouraged by their pastor, the Reverend John Robinson, the group contacted the London Company's Sir Edwin Sandy's who had helped the Jamestown colonists achieve self-government, and Sandys arranged a charter for them to establish a colony on what was then Virginia's far northern rim. 
# 6 __Upon awarding the charter, Sandys wrote the congregation: "I betake you with this design, which I hope verily is the work of God, to the greatest protection and blessings of the Highest." The Leiden congregation decided that one group of colonists would go first, led by church leaders William Brewster and William Bradford, and another group under Pastor Robinson would follow later. Robinson had a reputation for sound judgment, solid integrity, and sincere faith__"a worthy Instrument of the Gospel," a contemporary called him. He had inspired the Pilgrims' New World venture, but he would not live to see it: he would die of illness before he could rejoin the Pilgrims. Even so, they would be accompanied to America by his parting words. In July 1620, after the Leiden congregation observed a day of Solemn prayer and fasting, Robinson preached a farewell sermon.
# 7 __"Brethren," he told them, "we are now quickly to part from one another, whether I may ever live to see your face on earth any more, the God of Heaven only knows, but whether the Lord hath appointed that or not, I charge you before God and his blessed angels that you . . . follow the Lord Jesus Christ." Then he preached on a text from the book of Ezra: "I proclaimed a fast there, at the river of Ahava, that we might afflict ourselves before our God, to seek of him a right way for us, and for our little ones, and for all our substance." The application was obvious: the tiny band of Separatists was bound for the New World "to seek of him a right way . . . for our little ones, and for all. . . ."
# 8 __After a false start from Southhampton, about one hundred men, woman, and children left Plymouth, England, in September 1620, bound for wilderness America aboard the Mayflower. Twenty-seven of the adult passenges were Separatists; the rest were on-Separatists recruited to bolster the colony's numbers.  The majority__called "Strangers" by the Separatists__mainly sought a new start in a new land. Most, however, shared the Separatists Judeo-Christian worldview, and the two groups were compatible enough that they would collectively become known as the Pilgrims. "Being thus passed the vast ocean," William Bradford would note, "they had now no friends to welcome them, nor inns to entertaine or refresh their weatherbeaten bodys, no houses or much less townes to repaire too . . . and the whole countrie, full of woods & thickets [was] wild & savage. 
# 9 __Like the Jamestown settlers, the Pilgrims were unprepared for the challenges of the North American wilderness__it was so radically different from Europe. "They lacked everything but virture," observed Pilgrim scholar Roland G. Usher. "They . . . brought really nothing but good constitutions, loyalty to each other, good sense, patience, forbearance and devotion to a high religious ideal." That "high religious ideal" was Christianity, and it proved to be the crucial foundation for building a lasting colony amid the perils of the New World. They had landed outside the boundary of their charter and the jurisdiction of the London Company__which allowed them to build a faith-based colony with almost unrestricted freedom. Some type of civil government was necessary for law and order, however: a few "Strangers" were already muttering that once ashore "none had power to command them." 
# 10 __Before boarding ship in England, the Pilgrims had received a good-bye letter from Pastor Robinson, which had been read aloud to them at dockside. In it, he had encouraged them "daily to renew our repentances with our God" and to treat each other with respect__and "not easily take offence." He had predicted that some kind of civil government would be needed for the colony, and he advised them to establish a form of self-government based on "God's ordinances" with carefully chosen leaders who would govern "in the image of the Lord's power and authoritie." Establish a Bible-based government, administered by "virtuous" leaders, he counseled them. "Lastly, whereas you are become a body politik, using amongst your selves civil government . . . let your wisdome & godliness, appeare, not only in chusing shuch persons as do entirely love and will promote the common good, but also in yielding unto them all due honour & obedience in their lawful administrations. . . ."
# 11 __When they reached America, the Pilgrims promptly followed the pastor's advice about organizing a "body politik." Before leaving the Mayflower, forty-one Pilgrim men__Separatists and Strangers alike__assembled in the ship's main cabin. There, led by William Brewster, William Bradford, and John Carver__the colony's first governor__they signed a constitution or compact for governing the new colony. It would become known as the Mayflower Compact, and, likeVirginia's milestone legislative assembly, it would establish a precedent for constitutional law in America. It stated in full:
In the Name of God, Amen. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, & Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virture hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience.
In Witness whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620.
 # 12 __The Mayflower Compact reflected the Bible-based self-government the Pilgrims practiced in their Leiden congregation, and its drafters cited their source of authority__"In the name of God, Amen." It also reflected the historic Judeo-Christian tradition that government should be modeled on the "covenants" that God establish with His people in the Bible. In keeping with this belief, the Compact's signers vowed to "covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick" in order to establish "just and equal laws . . . for the general Good of the Colony." It clearly recognized that all law and authority__even that of a king__was by the "Grace of God," and its signers emphasized that they were acting "solemnly and mutually in the presence of God." The main purpose of the Plymouth Colony and its government, the Compact stated, was to promote "the glory of God, and the advancement of the Christian faith." This extraordinary corner-stone precedent for America law and government__the first American constitution__was thus founded not on the whims of man, but on the Higher Law of the Bible. 
# 13 __In the wilderness of New England, the Pilgrims also followed Pastor Robinson's advice to treat each other with biblical charity. When winter illnesses spread through their village of crude huts, the healthy sacrificially served those who were ill or dying__even when the "healthy" was reduced to seven adults. The few served the many, recalled one of them, and "spared no pains, night nor day, but with abundance of toyle and hazard of their owne health, fetched them woode, made them fires, drest them meat, made their beds, washed their loathsome cloaths . . . shewing herein their true love unto their friends & bretheren."
# 14 __Plymouth Colony lost half its population that first winter. In the spring, the survivors befriended a Native American man named Squanto, who taught them how to grow corn and catch fish, and who came to be valued by the grateful Pilgrims as a treasured "instrument sent of God for their good." When the Mayflower left for England, no Pilgrims were aboard: all had chosen to remain in America. Historians would attribute their survival and success to their aptitude, fidelity, wisdom, and practicality, but Pilgrim leader William Bradford placed the credit elsewhere: "it was the Lord which upheld them," he said simply.
# 15 _In 1621, the Council for New England, which held the charter to the land where the Pilgrims landed, granted them a patent for the colony. That year they also celebrated a fruitful harvest. "We set the last spring some twenty acres of Indian corn, and sowed some six acres of barley and pease," reported colonist Edward Winslow. "God be praised, we had a good increase of Indian corn, and our barley indifferent good. . . . And although it be not always so plentiful as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God we are so far from want. . . ."The plentiful harvest of 1621 also led to the enduring American tradition__Thanksgiving. Catholic colonists in New Spain had assembled to give thanks to God for their survival, and so had the Jamestown Anglicans. It was the Pilgrims of Plymouth, however, who would be credited for establishing America's distinctive Thanksgiving holiday with a joyous observance in the autumn of 1621.
# 16 _Days of thanksgiving were a Christian tradition that was modeled on the Jewish feast days recorded in the Old Testament. The Feast of Harvest (or Firstfruits) and the Feast of Tabernacles (or Ingathering) celebrated God's grace and provision at harvest-time. It was a time of rejoicing when all work ceased, Sabbath-style, and the people gathered in worship, offered the firstfruits of their labors to the Lord, extended mercy to the poor, and gave thanks to God. The New Testament called on believers to personally maintain an attitude of thanksgiving, and the early church observed times of thanksgiving. Later, in Medieval England, churchmen brought a lamb or a loaf of bread to mass on Lammas Day in thanksgiving for harvesttime.
# 17 _Following the Reformation, Protestants discarded the annual Catholic festivals, observing instead days of prayer, fasting, and thanksgiving. In his influential work, A Christian Dictionairie, seventeenth-century Puritan theologian Thomas Wilson, an English pastor at Canterbury, described a Christian thanksgiving in his day. His book was published just eight years before the Pilgrims left for the New World, and recorded the meaning of a thanksgiving observance in the early 1600s. A bibically authentic thanksgiving, Wilson wrote, included an "acknowledging and confessing, with gladness, of the benefits and deliverances of God, both toward ourselves and others to the praise of his Name." It included "Remembrance of the good done to us . . . Confessing God to be the Author and giver of it . . . being glad of an occasion to praise him, and doing it gladly, with joy."
# 18 _The famous 1621 celebration at Plymouth was the first of its kind for the Pilgrims in America, but it was not their first thanksgiving observance. During their years in Holland, the Separatist Pilgrime had repeatedly witnessed Leiden's annual day of thanksgiving, when the city's Protestants gave thanks to God for Leiden's deliverance from a brutal 1574 siege by the Spanish army. The future Pilgrims also celebrated their own thanksgiving observances in Holland, beginning soon after their arrival with an event designed to thank God for their escape from English persecution. The Separatist Pilgrims crried the practice to the New World, where they held thanksgiving observances in obedience to scripture such as PSALM 107:
O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good: for his mercy endureth for ever: Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he hath redeemed from the hand of the enemy; and gather them out of the lands. . . .They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way; they found no city to dwell in. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them out their distresses. And he led them forth by the right way, that they might go to a city of habitation. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men!
# 19 _The celebrated 1621 thanksgiving event at Plymouth was apparently commissioned by Pilgrim leader William Bradford, who had become Plymouth's second governor. The colony's first governor, John Carver, had died during the colonists' first winter. So had Bradford's wife, Dorothy, who tragically fell overboard and drowned soon after the Mayflower reached Cape Cod. Despite the heartbreaking losses and severe hardships, the colony had survived the winter__a feat that Bradford attributed to the grace of God. After a good harvest the following autumn, the governor made certain that the survivors "might after a speciall manner rejoice together." Pilgrim Edward Winslow, who also became a Plymouth governor, recorded a description of the event in a letter to a friend in England. Additional insight into the celebration was perserved in a memoir that Bradford later recorded. After "we had gather the fruits of our labours," as Winslow put it, Governor Bradford dispatched a four-man hunting party to obtain game for a celebration.
# 20 _The hunters returned with a week's supply of "fowle"__presumably the "waterfoule" and "wild Turkey's" that Bradford reported as plentiful at the time. Added to the event's menu was a supply of venison, which was contributed by Pokanoket Indians. Ninety members of the tribe and their leader, Massasoit, attended the celebration and were "entertained and feasted" as guests. The Pilgrims may have invited them as "strangers" in fulfillment of an admonition in the book of Deuteronomy: "And thou shalt rejoice in thy feast, thou, and thy son, and thy daughter, and thy servant, and thy maid, and the Levite and the stranger. . . ." If the celebration featured other foods mormally consumed by the Plymouth Pilgrims, it would have also included beaver, baked clams, lobster, cod, bass and other fish, Indian corn, peas, beans, cabbage, onions, parsnips, English cheese, porridge, biscuits, and corn-based hasty pudding. Typical beverages would have been ale and spring water. 
# 21 _The event lasted three days, and featured sports activities__"Recreations" in Winslow's words__which, if they were the usual Puritan fare, included footraces, jumping competition and wrestling. The festival's enterainment also included the use of fire-arms. Winslow reported that "we exercised our Armes," which may have referred to target shooting or a firing demonstration for Massasoit and his Pokanoket. The event's three-day length was unique: the usual Puritan thanksgiving observance lasted either a day or an entire week. Typically, it was preceded by a worship service, which Winslow did not mention in his letter. Did that mean the devout Pilgrim failed to worship? Or did Winslow simply assume the letter's recipient understood Separatist practices? The faith-based nature of the Pilgrims 1621 event was clearly demonstrated by the pattern they established with numerous other thanksgiving observances at Plymouth Colony. 
In 1623, for instance, when a prolonged drought threatened the colony's crops and survival, Plymouth's magistrates called for a day of prayer and fasting. Edward Winslow would record that event, too: 
To that end a day was set apart by public authority, and set apart from all other employments, hoping that the same God who had stirred us up hereunto, would be moved hereby in mercy to look down upon us, and grant the request of our dejected souls. . . . For though in the morning when we assembled together, the heavens were as clear and the drought as like to continue as ever it was; yet (our exercise continuing some eight or nine hours) before our departure the weather was over-cast, the clouds gather together on all sides, and on the next morning distilled such soft, sweet, and mild showers of rain, continuing some fourteen days, and mixed with such seasonable weather as it was hard to say whither our weathered corn or drooping affections were most quickened or revived. Such was the bounty and goodness of our God. 
# 23 _The lifesaving rain "gave them cause of rejoicing and blessing God," Governor Bradford would report, and Plymouth's leaders declared an official day of thanksgiving to God for his "gracious and speedy answer." With similar sentiment, Edward Winslow concluded his account of the original thanksgiving: "And although it be not always so plentifull as it was at this time with us, yet by the goodness of God, we are so farre from want. . . ." 
# 24 _In 1623, the Plymouth Pilgrims survived another serious but less obvious threat__the same common-store socialism that had plagued Jamestown. According to William Bradford, some colonists liked the common-store system and believed "that the taking away of property, and bringing community into a common wealth, would make them happy and flourishing." Instead, it bred "confusion & discontent, and retarded much employment that would have been to their benefit and comfort," according to Bradford. "God in his wisdom," he concluded, "saw another course fitter for them."
# 25 _The "fitter" course was the same biblical principle that Captain John Smith had adopted at Jamestown__"if and does not work, neither should he eat." Bradford replaced the common-store with the free enterprise system, which allowed the private ownership of land. "This had very good success," he would later report, "for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corne was planted then other wise would have bene by any means the Government or any other could use. . . ." This was more than a mere shift in economic policy: it was a faith-based decision to trust God and embrace individual initiative rather then looking to the government as provider.
# 26 _It set a precedent for the future American nation, which would thrive on personal freedom and individual initiative__the free enterprise system. Another precedent was set in 1636, when the Pilgrims established Plymouth's General Court, composed of the colony's governor and seven deputies chosen "to rule and govern the plantation within the limits of this corporation." It was a smaller Plymouth equivalent of Virginia's House of Burgesses.
# 27 __The deputies were chosen by the colonists to represent them, and therefore were authorized to govern by the consent of the governed. Like Virginia's legislature, it was a form of representative government grounded on the Higher Law of the Bible. The Pilgrims of Plymouth, observed nineteenth-century historian James Thatcher, "held the bible in estimation as the basis of all laws; and the precepts of the gospel [to be] the rules of their lives and the fountains of their dearest hopes. It was the interwoven sentiment of their hearts that the sovereign power resides with the people, and this was the fundamental axiom upon which their government was reared." Plymouth Colony grew slowly. Its people were poor, and their hardscrabble struggle discouraged new colonists for years to come. Even so, they remained true to their vision that God had called them to America as New World pioneers with a purpose. They were confident that they had been providentially placed in "New England" to craft a culture that honored and reflected biblical truth. They identified themselves with the Hebrew people of the Old Testament, who were led by God from Egyptian slavery into nationhood within the Promised Land. "Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt," wrote the psalmist. "Thou preparedst room before it and didst cause it to take deep root, and it filled the land." 
# 28 _The Pilgrims knew that Bible passage and fervently believed it applied to them. "God brought a vine into this wilderness," one proclaimed; "he made room for it and caused it to take deep root, and it filled the land." Plymouth's Separatists, like Jamestown's Anglicans, would mold the future of America in a mighty way, and at the root of their influence was a common faith. "Virginia as a Church of England colony and Plymouth as a separatist colony were products of the Reformation as it affected England," observed twentieth-century Colonail scholar Clarence Ver Steeg. "These transplanted ideas were eventually to be modified and molded into institutions."
# 29 - William Bradford predicted such an impact. "Thus, out of small beginnings, greater things have been produced by his hand that made all things of nothing," he wrote; "and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone to many . . . [L]et the glorious name of Jehovah have all the praise." At Plymouth and Jamestown, this "one small candle"__the Judeo-Christian worldview__kindled the flames of freedom for the future American republic. And soon, thousands more would fuel the blaze. 
 

"NEW JERUSALEM" - CHAPTER # 2

"NEW JERUSALEM" - CHAPTER # 2 __From the overhanging limbs of a riverside tree, Robert Hunt rigged a canopy from an unwanted sail, declared the crude shelter a "church," and called his congregation to worship. It was 1607, and Hunt was the chaplain of what would be the first successful English colony in America__the newly founded Jamestown settlement on the forested coast of Virginia. An Anglican minister who had been educated at Cambridge University, he had answered a call to leave his parish church and accompany three shiploads of English colonists to the foreboding wilds of the New World. No English colony had yet survived in North America, and only males were allowed on the maiden voyage to Jamestown. So taking the post of chaplain or vicar meant assuming grave risks, and saying good-bue to his wife and two children for an unknown period. Even so, Hunt had felt led to accept the call. On December 19, 1606, he and 104 other colonists had left England aboard the Susan Constant, the Discovery, and the Godspeed__bound for the distant, mysterious New World. 
# 2 _Calamity befell Hunt almost immediately. Stormy weather forced the ships to hug the English coast for two weeks, and the chaplain became seriously ill with an unidentified shipboard malady while still a mere twenty miles from home. The other passengers expected him to die, but Hunt surprised them and recovered. He then set about winning their trust. That was no small achievement: they were a boisterous, bickering lot, and, according to one of their number, a few were "little better than Atheists." By the time they made landfall in Virginia's Cape Henry in April 1607, however, they were willing to join Hunt in their first collective action in the New World: they erected a cross at Cape Henry, and thanked God for safe passage. The chaplain's love for the Lord and his pastor's heart for the people reportedly won their respect. So too, perhaps, did his pluck__he was described as "courageous" as well as "honest
[and] religious."
# 3 _Whether by patience, pluck, or providence__or all three __the determined chaplain brought light into the "darkness" of the New World wilderness. Sobered by an Indian attack that killed two of their number, the settlers moved inland from Cape Henry and established a crude settlement on the James River, which they named Jamestown in honor of the king. Immediately, the Reverend Hunt took an active role. As Jamestown's chaplain and vicar, he dedicated the selected site "in the name of God" and shouldered a share of the physical labor__"We are all laborers in a common vineyard," he told the colonists. In his ministry, he summoned the settlers to public prayer mornings and evenings, preached two sermons every Sunday, oversaw regular communion, and tended to the colonists like a shepherd to his flocks. Eventually, he moved worship services to a church that boasted four walls, even though one worshipper called it a "homely thing like a barne."
# 4 _Hacking out a life in the North American forest was far more grueling than Jamestown's colonists had imagined. Amid the harsh, hardscrabble conditions, morale teetered, but Hunt remained faithful and uncomplaining__even when a fire consumed his church, clothes, and precious books. As conditions turned deadly and the colonists were struck down by New World illness and hardship, Hunt nursed the ill and ministered to the dying. He also eased the colonists' contentious ways. "Many were the mischiefs that daily sprung from their ignoranr (yet ambitious) spirits," a Jamestown leader would report, "but the good Doctrine and exhortation of our preacher Mr Hunt reconciled them. . . " According to Jamestown's Captain John Smith, the courageous chaplain "quenched those flames of envie, and dissention." After more than a year of God's work in the wilderness, Robert Hunt was stricken by illness and died. His ministry had been brief, but the faith he followed would prove critical to the colony's survival.
# 5 _Along with its capitalist mission, the colony of Virgina was also faith-based from the beginning. Named for Queen Elizabeth I, the "Virgin Queen," it had been chartered in 1606 to the London Company by King James 1. The company intended to employ colonists to harvest gold and other natural resources, and find a water passage through the New World to expand the lucrative trade with the farway East Indies. Critical support for colonization of Virginia was fueled by the preaching of the Reverend William Crashaw, a prominent Puritan pastor and scholar in early-seventeenth-century England. From 1605 to 1613, Crashaw was rector of London's renowned Temple Church. There, in 1609, he preached a sermon that compared English colonization of the New World with the call of the Israelites into the Promised Land. "I say, many greater States than this is likely to prove hath as little or less beginning," he predicted. Printed and distributed throughout England, Crashaw's call to colonize the New World for Christ proved instrumental to the struggling colony, helping infuse it with financial support and new settlers.
# 6 _The original charter for the Virginia colony officially cited the "propagating of Christian Religion" as a goal for colonization and called it a "noble" work. Jamestown's early days were more desperate than "noble," but the Judeo-Christian worldwiew was central to the colony's creation and its survival. An Anglican minister named Richard Hakluyt was the colony's chief visionary in the beginning. A member of an influential family of merchants and investors, Hakluyt was an English authority on overseas navigation, exploration, and colonial development. A principal in the London Company, he believed New World colonization would enrich England, gave it world dominance, reward its investors__and enable Englishmen to carry the Gospel to untold scores of Native American people. Although noble efforts to Christianize Virginia's Indians were indeed made by some__including an attempt to establish an Indian "college"__Anglo-Indian relations were marked more by conflict than conversions. Even so, Jamestown's settlers came to America equipped with the biblical world__view, and, eventually, the application of biblical principles gave the colonists the discipline necessary to survive.
# 7 _They sorely needed assistance. Most were former city dwellers untrained in farming, hunting, and other survival skills. They managed to survive an early Indian attack, but most were soon struck down by fatal diseases. They had built their settlement on low, swampy land up the James River from Chesapeake Bay, and dysentery, scurvy, and malaria killed scores of them. So did starvation, which was encouraged by indolence and attitude. The Old World artisans and gentry among them refused to do the hard work that was necessary for survival__clearing trees, uprooting stumps, planting, weeding, construction. Even so, a socialistic form of government__the common store system__entitled everyone to equal rations from a common storehouse regardless of how much they worked. Amid constant squabbling and demoralizing dissension, the colonists began starving to death. When theyhad consumed all their livestock, they turned to dogs, cats, rats, and mice. Eventually, some reportedly restorted to cannibalism. Almost two-thirds of them died.
# 8 _Finally, Captain Smith, a professional soldier and explorer, saved the volony by obtaining food from neighboring Indians__and by enforcing a compulsory work program based on a New Testament admonition: "if any would not work, neither should he eat." Discarding the common-store system, Smith insisted that settlers had to work in order to draw rations. So they held on__barely: when Smith returned to England in 1609, the starving resumed and within months, the colony was again in peril. A relief expedition arrived in 1610, however, and Virginia's new governor, Lord De La Warr, secured the colony with fresh supplies and several hundred more colonists. Captain Smith considered the timing of the rescue to be providential. "God inclineth all casual events to worke the neccessary helpe of his Saints," he proclaimed. Two and a half centuries later, Pulitzer Prize__winning historian Samuel Eliot Morison would conclude: "The only thing that kept Virginia alive in these difficult years was the patriotism and deep religious faith of some of the leaders."
# 9 _Two of those leaders who "kept Virginia alive" were Sir Thomas Gates and Sir Thomas Dale, both knighted English military officers appointed by the London Company to preserve the Virginia colony during its desperate early years. Destruction seemed imminent on several occasions, and Jamestown's serve conditions reduced some colonists to personal savagery__described by one of their number as "disordered persons, so prophane, so rioutous, so full of treasonable Intendments." In 1609, Governor Gates established a code of laws for the colony, which Governor Dale expanded two years later during his administration. Both governors oversaw harsh, military-style law enforcement, which embittered many Virginia settlers__but the laws produced the discipline necessary for the colony's survival.
# 10 _Gates and Dale believed that biblical principles were the cure for frontier savagery, and that Christianity was the proper foundation for an orderly society. To Dale, wildness Virginia offered the opportunity to establish what he envisioned as a "new Jerusalem." Building on statutes implemented earlier by Gates, he established a code of laws for Virginia__the Laws Divine, Moral and Martial. It was the first formal criminal and civil code in America. Like English law, it was based on the Bible. "First," stated the introduction to the Laws, Since we owe our highest and supreme duty, our greatest, and all our allegeance to him, from whom all power and authoritie is derived . . . the King of kings, the commaunder of commanunders, and Lord of Hosts, I do strictly commaund and charge all Captaines and Officers . . . to have a care that the Almightie  God bee duly and daily served, and that thy call upon their people to beare Sermons, as that also they diligently frequent Morning and Evening praier themselves by their owne exemplar and daily life, and dutie herein, encouraging others thereunto. . . .
# 11 _Governor Dale returned to England in 1616. His successor eased the harsh military penalties for wrongdoings in Virginia, but kept Dale's laws in place. Virginia was hardly the "new Jerusalem" Dale had envisioned, but his Bible-based code of laws eventually transformed the colony from a desperate state of rebellion, starvation, disease, and desperation to a "tranquil and prosperous" colony. It was a long and arduous transformation, marked at times by disasters and disillusionment, but also by a determination, perseverance, and faith that were indeed "noble" at times. Jamestown evolved into the first successful English colony in America and established a precedent for American law and culture, both of which began at Jamestown with a faith-based foundation__the Judeo-Christian worldview.
# 12 _That worldview helped established another important American precedent in Virginia__self-government. By 1619, the colony was relatively stable and was expanding inland. Gone were the slovenly ways of the common-store system, which had been replaced by free enterprise and biblically inspired accountability. "When our people were fed out of the common store," oberved a colonial leader, "glad was he who could slip from his labour, or slumber over his taske . . . the most honest among them would hardly take so much true paines in a week as now for themselves they will doe in a day." The Virginia colonists learned to grow tobacco, which gave the colony an expanding economy. To provide wives for the Virginia settlers, the London Company recruited English women__"young and incorrupt maids," they were called__and the colony was infused with the stability of family life. Within a dozen years, Virginia had been transformed from desperation to development, thanks to rule of law, family life, free enterprise__all of which were faith-based. So too was the dramatic jump forward in political freedom that occurred in 1619.
# 13 _That year, Virginia governor George Yeardley convened the first legislative assembly in America. Known as the House of Burgesses, it was composed of twenty-two elected representatives, or burgesses, chosen by the Virginia colonists. Governor Yeardley was acting at the direction of Sir Edwin Sandys, the London Company's new treasurer and chief officer. The son of an Anglican archbishop who had helped translate the Bible into English, Sandys was the author of a popular and respected book on the state of Christianity in Eurpoe and a book of hymns. He was also a principal leader in the English Parliament, who believed the Virginia Colony would prosper if its colonists could own land and exercise self-government.
# 14 _Under Sandys's direction, the London Company restructured the colony under what was called the Great Charter, which allowed private land ownership, implemented a strategy to Christianize Virginia's Indian tribes, and established the House of Burgesses, which was also called the General Assembly. Company officials in London initially held veto power, and the legislature was under nominal oversight of the king__but England's monarchs took little interest in distant Virginia's fledgling General Assembly. Gradually, the law of the land in Virginia was determined by the House of Burgesses__which grew into a bicameral legislature elected by the people. It became the cornerstone of American government and established two fundamental precedents for the future American nation: America's political tradition would be self-government, and it would be based on the biblical world-view.
# 15 _ The English common law that inspired American law and government was also based largely on the Bible. The English constitution was not a single document, but was a collection of legal traditions, judicial rulings, and historic statutes the developed from Anglo-Saxon culture, Christianity's canon law, and milestone legal statutes__especially the Magna Carta. In 1215, a group of English barons foeced England's King John to sign a document that guaranteed basic God-given or inalienable freedoms to his subjects, and officially proclaimed that even the English monarchy was under rule of law, The Magna Carta, as King John's concession would be known, was the legal cornerstone of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was drafted by a leading Christian theologian and authority on canon law__Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury__and was rooted in the Higher Law of Scripture.
# 16 _The English common law that inspired American law and government was also based largly on the Bible. The English constitution was not a single document, but was a collection of legal traditions, judicial rulings, and historic statutes that developed from Anglo-Saxon culture, Christianity's canon law, and milestone legal statutes-especially the Magna Carta. In 1215, a group of English barons forced England's King John to sign a document that guaranteed basic God-given or inalienable freedoms to his subjects, and officially proclaimed that even the English monarchy was under rule of law. The Magna Carta, as King John's concession would be known, was the legal cornerstone of Britain's constitutional monarchy. It was drafted by a leading Christian theologian and authority on canon law__Stephen Langton, the archbishop of Canterbury__and was rooted in the Higher Law of Scripture.
# 17 _The legislators enacted dozens of statutes. Among them were laws mandating church attendance on the Lord's Day, a measure requiring that Sundays be kept "in holy and religious order," a provision to financially support Virginia's Anglican clergymen, and regulations outlawing drunkenness and "Gaming with Dice & Cardes." Two years later, in 1621, a new constitution for Virginia dedicated the colony anew to "the Advancement of the Honour and Service of God, and the Enlargement of His Kingdom." The enlargement of the colony faced a severe setback in 1622, when a devastating Indian attack claimed the lives of hundreds of colonists. The attack and mismangement of the colony by the London Company led King James to revoke the colony's charter and make Virginia a royal colony. In 1698, the colony's capital was shifted from Jamestown to nearby Williamsburg. The Jametown settlement eventually disappeared, but the colony of Virginia survived and prospered__and its heritage of Bible-based self-government became a model for the future American nation. Meanwhile, some 450 miles up the forested coasts of America, another model was emerging__and it too was founded on faith.
#  

"PLEAD OUR CAUSE, O LORD" _ CHAPTER # 1

PLEAD OUR CAUSE, O LORD - CHAPTER # 1 !!!    Already they were bickering. It was day two of the First Continental Congrees__Tuesday, September 6, 1774. Delegates from twelve of America's thirteen colonies had assembled at Carpenters Hall in Philadelphian to officially reacts to deteriorating relations between Great Britain and its American colonies. Decades of disagreement had led to a tense crisis between the colonies and the Mother Country. In an attempt to resolve the issues, the colonies had dispatched delegations to Philadelphia's gtand assembly, which was the first of its king in America. Oprning deliberations had been cordial and productive. The delegates had voted to call their assembly the "Continental Congress," had appointed Virginia delegate Peyton Randolph as its president, and had agreed to meet in Philadelphia's Carpenters Hall. Then came day two__and the opening display of cooperation sank into a mire of argument.

# 2 _At issue was the question of how to count votes. Large colonies wanted their populations to count for more. Small colonies wanted equal repersentation. Amid the debate, Philadelphia's church bells began tolling at the news that British forces were bombarding the city of Boston. It was a false alarm, but it added to an atmosphere of anxiety in Congress. The dark mood may have been heightened by the deadly risk each delegate faced by simply being there. The unprecedented assembly was unauthorized by Britain's King George 111 or the British Parliament. Among the delegates in attendance were men who believed the British government's treatment of the American colonies amounted to tyranny. Such politics were deemed treasonous by some, and the delegates undoubtedly knew what grisly fate sometimes befell traitors to the Crown.

# 3 _If arrested and convicted of high treason, a delegate might find himself in Great Britain's notorious Tower of London, waiting to be "drawn and quartered." If so sentenced, he would first be hanged until almost dead, then cut down and disemboweled. While still alive, he would be forced to watch his intestines burned. Then, one by one, other bodily organs would be torturously removed until death finally occurred. Afterward, his corpse would be beheaded and his torso cut into quarters. Finally, his head would be publicly mounted on a post. "Let us prepare for the worst," New Jersey delegate Abraham Clark at one point advised a colleague; "we can Die here but once." Debate on how to count votes concluded with a consensus__a single vote for each delegation__but the tension among delegates led some to fear that the Continental Congress might dissolve in disunity.

# 4 _Then Massachusetts delegate Thomas Cushing made a motion. Cushing was a forty-nine-year-old Boston lawyer, a Harvard alumnus, and a successful merchant. A member of the Masschusetts Committee of Safety, he was a prominent champion of Colonial political rights__always "busy in the interest of liberty," according to a colleagus. He observed the second day's tense deliberations with the savvy of a seasoned stateman__then he acted. From now on, Cushing formally proposed, Congress should officially open its day with prayer. The motion reflected Cushing's personal faith__he was a deacon at Boston's Old South Congregational Church__and it also reflectedthe common faith of most delegates. Even so, Cushing's motion for prayer provoked an immediate challenge.

# 5 _Concerns were voiced by John Rutledge of South Carolina and John Jay of New York. A thirty-five-year-old Lordon-educated attorney, Rutledge was renowned for his eloquence and political acumen. The older of two brothers in the South Carolina delegation, he would eventually become his state's governor and later the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He was anything but a critic of Christianity: tutored by clergymen as a child, he was an Anglican who worshipped at Charleston's St. Michael's Church.

# 6 _John Jay was also  a believer. At twenty-eight, the New York attorney was a prominent member of New York City's Trinity Church. Descended from French Huguenots who had been driven from Europe for their Protestant faith, he would eventually become president of the American Bible Society. Like Rutledge, he too would someday become a governor and a U.S. chief justice, and__like Rutledge__he made no argument for separation of church and state. They were merely concerned that a congressional prayer might increase disunity because so many Christian denominations were represented in Congress. Could the delegte unite in a congressional act of worship?

# 7 _Massachusetts delegate Samuel Adams believed so__and he quickly rose to support Cushing's prayer motion. By almost any measure, Sam Adams was the most famous advocate of Colonial rights in America__and the most controversial. Politics was his passion, and he was a master of the craft. An instrumental leader in the Massachusetts legislature, he was viewed by many as Colonial America's leading defender, but Britain's leaders called him an "angel of darkness." He too was devout. Raised in a family of committed Christians, he had considered the ministry in his youth. Now, as a middle-aged Calvinist, he took his faith seriously, and was said to possess "the dogmatism of a priest."

# 8 _He was "no Bigot," Sam Adams told his fellow delegates. He "could hear a Prayer from a Gentleman of Piety and Virtue, who was at the same Time a Friend to his Country"__and he heartily endorsed the call to congressioal prayer. Congress agreed__and promptly passed Cushing's motion. Beginning the next day, the Continental Congress would officially open every day's session with prayer. But who would be the first to pray? In an obvious display of congressional unity, Samuel Adams, a Puritan Congregationalist, nominated an Anglican clergyman to offer the first official prayer. Congress approved his nomination and promptly sent an invitation to the selected minister.

# 9 _His name was Jacob Duche, and at age thirty-seven, he may have been the most popular preacher in Philadphia. The Anglican pastor of Philadelphia's prestigious Christ Church, Duche was the son of a former Philadelphia mayor and brother-in-law to congressional delegate Francis Hopkinson. A graduate of Cambridge University, he was well educated, served as professor of ortaory at the College of Philadelphia, and was renowned for his eloquence in the pulpit. The invitation to open Congress with prayer was a measure of his prominence, but carried genuine risk: Duche was a minister in the Church of England, Britain's official state church, and accepting the invitation could have put him in harm's way with the British government. He accepted anyway.

# 10 _The next morning__Wednesday, September 7, 1774__the pastor appeared before the delegates attired in Anglican clergyman's robes. When the Congress was called to order, he opened the day's session with a formal prayer, then followed it by reading from the Bible. The Bible passage Duche read was the Anglican "collect" for the day__the scripture scheduled for that day in the Anglican Book of Common Prayer__PSALM 35:

Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with me: fight against them that fight against me. Take hold shield and buckler; and stand up for mine help. Draw out also the spear; and stop the way against them that persecute me: say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul: let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my hurt. Let them be as chaff before the wind: and let the angel of the Lord chase them. Let their way be dark and slippery: and let the angel of the Lord persecute them. For without cause have they hid for me their net in a pit, which without cause they have digged for my soul. Let destructioncome upon him at unawares; and let his net that he hath bid catch himself: into that very destruction let him fall. And my soul shall be joyful in the Lord: it shall rejoice in his salvation. . . .Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion together that rejoice at mine hurt: let them be clothed with shame and dishonour that magnify themselves against me. Let them shout for joy, and be glad, that favour my righteous cause: yea, let them say continually, Let the Lord be magnified, which hath pleasure in the prosperity of his servant. And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and of thy praise all the day long.

# 11 _Assembled in the intimidating shadow of Royal power, the  delegates found the relevance of Psalm 35 to be extraordinary. It was all the more striking for those who realized that particular Psalm had been placed in the prayer book as the reading for September seventh many years earlier. "It seemed as if Heaven had ordained that Psalm to be read on that morning," Massachusetts' John Adams wrote his wife. Duche's prayers were apparently equally moving. The Secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thompson, managed to record one of them as it echoed in the stillness of Carpenters Hall.

O! Lord, our heavenly father, King of Kings and Lord of lords: who dost from thy throne behold all the dwellers upon earth and reignest with power supreme & uncontrouled over all kingdoms, empires and governments, look down in mercy, we beseech thee, upon these our American states who have fled to thee from the road of the oppressor and thrown themselves upon thy gracious protection, desiring henceforth to be dependent only on thee.

# 12 _To thee they have appealed for the righteousness of their Cause; to Thee do they look up, for that countenance & support which Thou alone canst give. Take them, therefore, Heavenly Father, under thy nurturing care: give them wisdom in council, valour in the field. Defeat the malicious designs for our cruel adversaries. Convince them of the unrighteousness of their cause. And if they persist in their sanguinary purposes, O! let the voice of thy unerring justice sounding in their hearts constrain them to drop the weapons of war from their enerved hands in the day of battle.

# 13 _Be thou present, O God of Wisdom and direct the counsels of this honourable Assembly. Enable them to settle things upon the best and surest foundation, that the scene of blood may be speedily closed; that harmony and peace may effectually be restored, and truth and justice, religion and piety prevail and flourish amongst thy people. Preserve the health of their bodies and the vigour of their minds; shower down upon them and the millions they represent such temporal blessings as Thou seest expedient for them in this world, and crown them with everlasting glory in the world to come. All this we ask in the name and through the merits of Jesus Christ thy son, Our Saviour, AMEN. 

# 14 _Some delegates were moved to tears. Duche's prayer, marveled John Adams, was "as pertinent, as affectionate, as sublime, as devout, as I ever heard offered up to Heaven. He filled every Bosom present." Connecticut's Silas Deane said the congressional devotion was "worth riding One Hundred Mile to hear." On a motion by New York's James Duane, the delegates unanimously voted to award Duche the official thanks of Congress. After the prayer and Bible-reading, some said, Congress had a renewed sense of purpose and unity.

# 15 _Their decision to find their way by faith was typical of Colonial America. In eighteenth-century America, observed Colonial scholar Patricia Bonomi, "the idiom of religion penetrated all discourse, underly all thought, marked all observances [and] gave meaning to every public and private crisis." The philosophical foundation of Colonial American culture, law, and government was the Judeo-Christian worldview. It was also the flame of inspiration that fired the American quest for freedom. The common people of Colonial America and their learders would soon established a new nation, and it would be founded on an old Book__THE BIBLE.

BIRTH OF THE NATION 1607 - 1776

# 1 _He was old now__white headed and weather-faced__but his memories were rich. He had been present at creation__at the birth of the nation. What scenes he had witnessed: Stamp Act protests, rousing debates in the Massachusetts legislature, ministers passionately preaching freedom from the pulpit, crowds crying, "No taxation without representation!"__and tons of tea spreading like brown ink in Boston Harbor. He has almost been captured by British troops at Lexington in 1775, when the shots were fired that changed the world. He had served as a delegate to the Continental Congress__as the most famous man there, by some estimate. He could remember the faces, the voices, the votes for independence__and the fresh, new appearance of the Declaration of Independence, which bore his signature.
# 2 _He was Samuel Adams, and in March 1797 he was seventy-four years old. He had served God and the people almost his entire life, and he was not finished yet. Not quite. He had been a political writer, an agitator, a legislator, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a United States congressman, a member of the Massachusetts convention that ratified the U.S. Constitution, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts__and now, in his final years, he was the state's governor.
 He had seen so much__a grand, sweeping survey of America-in-the-making-and yet, he still had important duties to perform.
# 3 _One of them was before him now. It was his responsibility as governor to issue an official proclamation for the commonwealth of Massachusetts. This was no frivolous public statement. It did not resemble future proclamations issued by governors to promote tourism, celebrate sports victories, or recognize beauty queens, state fairs, and cooking festivals. On March 20, 1797, founding father Samuel Adams, now governor of Massachusetts, issued an official state proclamation calling for a "Day of Solemn Fasting and Prayer" in Massachusetts.
# 4 _It was not an unusual government action in eighteenth-century America: legislatures, governors, and the Anerican Congress had officially called for days of thanksgiving and had set aside official days for prayer and fasting. On the designated days, normal activities ceased in most places. Businesses closed. Traffic disappeared. Countless Americans assembled in their churches. Ministers of the Gospel, the most respected professionals in America, led them in worship, confessing sins, giving thanks, and respectfully imploring the blessings of Almighty God.
# 5 _Adams now did so again. With the "advice and consent" of the state legislatute, he officially proclaimed that a day in May would be set aside throughtout Massachusetts "for the purpose of public fasting prayer." On that day, "Ministers of the Gospel, with their respected congregationd" were asked to "assmble together and seriously consider, and with one untied voice confess our past sins and transgressions, with holy resolutions, by the Grace of God, to turn our feet into the path of His Law__Humbly beseeching Him to endue us with all the Christian spirit of Piety, Benevolence and the Love of our Country; and that in all our public deliberations we may be possessed of a sacred regard to the fundamental principles of our free elective civil Constitutions. . . .'' As governor, Adams also called on the people of Massachusetts to pray for the state's businesses, its industry, its education system, for the other American states, and for the national goverment. "And I do hereby recommend," he added, "that all unnecessary labour and recreation may be suspended on the said day." The proclamation concluded with an official request that would undoubetedly seem statling to many in a distant, future America:
I concede that we cannot better express ourselves than by humbly supplicating the Supreme Ruler of the World__That the rod of tyrants may be broken into pieces, and the oppressed made Free__That wars may cease in all the Earth, and that the confusions that are and have been among the Nations may be overruled for the promoting and speedily bringing on that holy and happy period, when the Kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ may be everywhere established, and all the people willingly bow to the Sceptre of Him who is the Prince of Peace.
# 6 _By issuing such an official proclamation, were the governor and legislature of Massachusetts violating the United States Constitution? Not to their thinking. Samuel Adams had signed the Declaration of Independence and had voted to ratify the U.S. Constitution. Therefore, he not only understood the original intent of America's founding documents__he had helped make them. So had many others in his day, and they too had crafted, assisted, or observed First Day proclamations such as the one Samuel Adams issued in 1797. For them, America's foundation of faith was common knowledge, and they viewed American liberty as a legacy of the Judeo-Christian worldview. In their day, it was an accepted fact that American and English law were based on the Higher Law of the Bible__ans so were America's founding documents."The general principles on which the fathers achieved independence, were the only principles in which that beautiful assembly of young gentleman could unite," wrote founding father John Adams. "And what were these general principles? I answer, the general principles of Christianity. . . ." America's founding fathers, however, did not act alone: their decisive, deliberate actions reflected the common values of the people they represented. They were the real founding fathers__the people of Colonial America whose values forged the nation. Today, they are largely forgotten. So too are many of the key events that motivated them, such as the Great Awakening, and many of the leaders who inspired them, such as Jonathan Edwards, Samuel Davies, George Whitefield, even Samuel Adams. Fading too among the American public is awareness of the nations, founding values, such as Higher Law and inalienable rights.
# 7 _Some modern historians, such as the Jewish scholar Abraham Katsh, have labored mightily to preserve a record of America's faith__based founding. Of the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, Katsh wrote: "there runs through these two prime instruments of American government the deeper meaning and higher purpose of a constant regard for principles and religious ideads, based on a profound sympathy with the Scriptures. . . ." The historical record is clear: America was forged on faith. But is that foundational fact common knowledge in contemporary America? Or has it been cast aside amid the clutter of modern distractions? Or perhaps lost by the neglect of the disinterested?
# 8 _In a contemporary classroom survey of upper-level American university students, all demonstrated extensive knowledge of popular culture-music and musicians, actors and actresses, star performers of the NBA, NFL, and NASCAR. They correctly identified the leading contestants in a televised talent show and the titles of contemporary motion pictures. When queried on topics from American history, all demonstrated a general knowledge that was decidedly superior to the random on-the-street interviews frequently cited in the modern news madia. Fewer than 10 percent, however, correctly indentified Jonathan Edwards. One percent knew of George Whitefield. Twice as many thought Samuel Adams was an alcoholic beverage rather than a founding father. One percent recognized the Great Awakening. None__not one__was able to correctly identify John Calvin's Institutes or apparently had ever heard of Higher Law.
# 9 _A century after his death , New England theologian Jonathan Edwards, whose 1741 sermon launched the Great Awakening, was deemed so important that Harvard historian Gerorge Bancroft devoted numerous pages to him in his epic History of the United States of America. Fifty years later, in the early twentieth century, Pulitzer Prize__winning historian Edward Channing depicted Edwards as a "keen intellect" who "united wonderful skill in the use of language and remarkable power of expression." In the same era, Encyclopaedia Britannica described Edwards as "an earnest, devout Christian and a man of blameless life," who had achieved a "great work" of scholarship. When New York University established the nationally acclaimed Hall of Fame for Great Americans in 1901, Edwards was honored as one of its first inductees, and was enshrined alongside Gerorge Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.
# 10 _By the twenty-first century, however, Americans and their heroes had changed. Jonathan Edwards was now unkown to most and discredited by others. In contrast to the respectful treatment Edwards had received from biographers a century earlier, he was now denounced for "high-handedness and bigotry" by a leading online student encyclopedia. The famous sermon that sparked the Great Awakening was dismissed as an "appeal to religious fear," and the faith in Christ inspired by his preaching was belittled as emotional "convulsions and hysteria." As for the Great Awakening__the unprecedented revival that inspired American independence? It was merely an odd "religious frenzy," the encyclopedia's student readers were informed, which spun "out of control" and stifled "liberal interpretation of doctrine."