This post/list comes courtesy of Cody Justice: https://www.facebook.com/plymouth.weaver
Some #Thanksgiving #ChristianNationalism food for those who have appetite.
"To omit Calvin from the forces of Western evolution is to read history with one eye shut."
—Lord John Morley
"It would hardly be too much to say that for the latter part of his lifetime and a century after his death John Calvin was the most influential man in the world, in the sense that his ideas were making more history than those of anyone else during that period. Calvin’s theology produced the Puritans in England, the Huguenots in France, the ‘Beggars’ in Holland, the Covenanters in Scotland, and the Pilgrim Fathers of New England, and was more or less directly responsible for the Scottish uprising, the revolt of the Netherlands, the French wars of religion, and the English Civil War. Also, it was Calvin’s doctrine of the state as a servant of God that established the ideal of constitutional representative government and led to the explicit acknowledgment of the rights and liberties of subjects. . . . It is doubtful whether any other theologian has ever played so significant a part in world history."
—J. I. Packer
"The strength of that heretic [Calvin] consisted in this, that money never had the slightest charm for him. If I had such servants my dominion would extend from sea to sea."
—Pope Pius IV
"Whatever the cause, the Calvinists were the only fighting Protestants. It was they whose faith gave them courage to stand up for the Reformation. In England, Scotland, France, Holland, they, and they only, did the work, and but for them the Reformation would have been crushed... If it had not been for Calvinists, Huguenots, Puritans, and whatever you like to call them, the Pope and Philip would have won, and we should either be Papists or Socialists."
—Sir John Skelton
"[Calvinists] are the true heroes of England. They founded England, in spite of the corruption of the Stuarts, by the exercise of duty, by the practice of justice, by obstinate toil, by vindication of right, by resistance to oppression, by the conquest of liberty, by the repression of vice. They founded Scotland; they founded the United States; at this day they are, by their descendants, founding Australia and colonizing the world."
—French atheist Hippolyte Taine (1828 to 1893)
"Calvinism has been the chief source of republican government."
—Lorraine Boettner
"In Calvinism lies the origin and guarantee of our constitutional liberties."
—Groen van Prinsterer
"John Calvin was the virtual founder of America."
—German historian Leopold von Ranke
"The Revolution of 1776, so far as it was affected by religion, was a Presbyterian measure. It was the natural outgrowth of the principles which the Presbyterianism of the Old World planted in her sons, the English Puritans, the Scotch Covenanters, the French Huguenots, the Dutch Calvinists, and the Presbyterians of Ulster."
—George Bancroft
“He who will not honor the memory and respect the influence of Calvin knows but little of the origin of American liberty.”
—George Bancroft
"Let not Geneva be forgotten or despised. Religious liberty in the West owes Calvin much respect."
—John Adams
Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, a Roman Catholic intellectual and National Review contributor, asserts: “If we call the American statesmen of the late eighteenth century the Founding Fathers of the United States, then the Pilgrims and Puritans were the grandfathers and Calvin the great-grandfather…”
“In the firm conviction that virtue must finally be supreme, and that a wise and beneficent Providence has designed this continent to be the theater of the yet more glorious conquests of Christianity, it is the mission and the duty of all friends of the evangelical truth to combine in the attempt to hold and appropriate this country, with its resources, monuments, and institutions, for an empire devoted to the spread of God’s kingdom in the earth and the universal reign of Jesus Christ.”
–Byron Sunderland (1863), The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the U.S, pg. 29
"The persecutions of the Puritans in England for non-conformity, and the religious agitations and conflicts in Germany by Luther, in Geneva by Calvin and in Scotland by Knox, were the preparatory ordeals for qualifying Christian men for the work of establishing the civil institutions on the American continent. “God sifted” in these conflicts, “a whole nation, that he might send choice grain over into this wilderness;” and the blood and persecution of the martyrs became the seed of both church and state.”
–Morris, Christian Life and Character, pg. 41
US SENATE, 1853: [re: Constitution Article 1, Section 7, Paragraph 2] “In the law, Sunday is a “dies non;” ...The executive departments, the public establishments, are all closed on Sundays; on that day neither House of Congress sits...Here is a recognition by law, and by universal usage, not only of a Sabbath, but of the Christian Sabbath, in exclusion of the Jewish or Mohammedan Sabbath...The recognition of the Christian Sabbath [by the Constitution] is complete and perfect.”
—BF Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States, Philadelphia: GW Childs, 1864, p.65-68
US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 1854: [Petitioners sought to dismiss military and congressional chaplains. The courts and House had already rejected them] “At the adoption of the
Constitution, we believe every State -- certainly ten of the thirteen -- provided as regularly for the support of the Church as for the support of the Government...Had the people, during the Revolution, had a suspicion of any attempt to war against Christianity, that Revolution would have been strangled in its cradle. At the time of the adoption of the Constitution and the amendments, the universal sentiment was that Christianity should be encouraged, but not any one sect...It [Christianity] ...must be considered as the foundation on which the whole structure rests. Laws will
not have permanence or power without the sanction of religious sentiment, --without a firm belief that there is a Power above us that will reward our virtues and punish our vices. In this age, there is no substitute for Christianity: that, in its general principles, is the great conservative element on which we must rely for the purity and permanence of free institutions. That was the religion of the
founders of the republic, and they expected it to remain the religion of their descendants. There is a great and very prevalent error on this subject in the opinion that those who organized this
Government did not legislate on religion.”.
—BF Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the
Civil Institutions of the United States; Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1864, p 317-323
US HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, 1854: “The great vital and conservative element in our system is the belief of our people in the pure doctrines and divine truths of the gospel of Jesus Christ.”
—BF Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States; Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1864, p 328
“This is a Christian nation, first in name, and secondly because
of the many and mighty elements of a pure Christianity which have given it character and shaped its destiny from the beginning. It is pre-eminently the land of the Bible, of the Christian Church, and of
the Christian Sabbath...The chief security and glory of the United States of America has been, is now, and will be forever, the prevalence and domination of the Christian Faith.”
—BF Morris, The Christian Life and Character of the Civil Institutions of the United States; Philadelphia: George W. Childs, 1864, p 11
DANIEL WEBSTER, 1820: “Cultivated mind was to act on uncultivated nature; and more than all, a government and a country were to commence, with the very first foundations laid under the divine light of the Christian religion. Happy Auspices of a happy futurity! Who would wish that his country’s existence had otherwise begun? ...Our fathers were brought hither by their high
veneration for the Christian religion. They journeyed by its light, and labored in its hope. They sought to incorporate its principles with the elements of their society, and to diffuse its influence
through all their institutions, civil, political, or literary.”
—The Works of Daniel Webster, Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1853, Vol 1, p.22
ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, 1830’s: “Upon my arrival in the United States, the religious aspect of the country was the first thing that struck my attention; and the longer I stayed there, the more
did I perceive the great political consequences resulting from this state of things, to which I was unaccustomed. In France I had almost always seen the spirit of religion and the spirit of freedom
pursuing courses diametrically opposed to each other; but in America I found that they were intimately united, and that they reigned in common over the same country. p.337
---The Americans combine the notions of Christianity and of liberty so intimately in their minds, that it is impossible to make them conceive the one without the other. p.335
---Religion in America...must nevertheless be regarded as the foremost of the political institutions
of that country. p.334
---They brought with them...a form of Christianity, which I cannot better describe, than by styling it a democratic and republican religion...From the earliest settlement of the emigrants, politics and
religion contracted an alliance which has never been dissolved. p.328
---I do not know whether all the Americans have a sincere faith in their religion; for who can search the human heart? but I am certain that they hold it to be indispensable to the maintenance of republican institutions. This opinion is not peculiar to a class of citizens or to a party, but it belongs to the whole nation, and to every rank of society. p.334
---Christianity, therefore, reigns without any obstacle, by universal consent.”p.333
—The Republic of the United States of America and Its Political Institutions, Reviewed and Examined, Henry Reeves, trans., Vol 1, pages as listed above, Garden City, NY: AS Barnes & Co., 1851
"The State cannot be restored to order until it settles down upon some form of religion again. As the subjects of a State must have a religion in order to be truly obedient, and as it is the true religion alone which converts obedience into a living principle, it is obvious that a Commonwealth can no more be organized which shall recognize all religions, than one which shall recognize none. The sanctions of its laws must have a centre of unity somewhere.
To combine in the same government contradictory systems of faith is as hopelessly impossible as to constitute into one State men of different races and languages. The Christian, the Pagan, the Mohammedan, Jews, Infidels and Turks, cannot coalesce as organic elements in one body politic. The State must take its religious type from the doctrines, the precepts, and the institutions of one or the other of these parties...
The Church and the State, as visible institutions, are entirely distinct, and neither can usurp the province of the other without injury to both. But religion, as a life, as an inward principle, though specially developed and fostered by the Church, extends its domain beyond the sphere of technical worship, touches all the relations of man, and constitutes the inspiration of every duty.
The service of the Commonwealth becomes an act of piety to God. The State realizes its religious character through the religious character of its subjects; and a State is and ought to be Christian, because all its subjects are and ought to be determined by the principles of the Gospel. As every legislator is bound to be a Christian man, he has no right to vote for any laws which are inconsistent with the teachings of the Scriptures. He must carry his Christian conscience into the halls of legislation."
—James Henley Thornwell
"On the 22d of December, 1620, the Puritans, one hundred and one in number, landed from the Mayflower, and planted their feet on the Rock of Plymouth, and began a new era in the history of the world. The day and the rock became canonized in American history, and emblems of the grandest Christian ideas and associations. The first act of the Puritans, after landing, was to kneel down and offer their thanksgiving to God, and by a solemn act of prayer, and in the name and for the sake of Christ, to take possession of the continent.
They thus repeated the Christian consecration which Columbus, more than a century before, had given to the New World, and so twice in the most formal and solemn manner was it devoted to Christ and Christian civilization. The seed thus planted bore an abundant harvest of Christian fruits, which have blessed the nation and enriched the world. How significant and sublime the lessons that gather round and flow from Plymouth Rock! How does it speak for God and of God! How grandly does it proclaim the Christian faith and fruits of those great and good men who, in prayer and faith, planted a Christian empire in the New World, and started a Christian nation on a noble career of progress and greatness!"
—Benjamin Morris
Grab the ox goad. Find some foxes and torches, and light it up. The land belongs to us, and to our children.
Comments
Post a Comment