Choose Just Men

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Most people remember Noah Webster as the guy who wrote the dictionary, but Webster was a major player in Colonial times, one of the two hundred or so men known as the Founders; men without whom the United States would have never come into existence.  He served as a legislator, judge and educator and was largely responsible for Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

In the middle of an election year, we would do well to remember Webster’s wisdom from a section of his “Value of the Christian Religion” entitled “Advice to the Young”:

“When you become entitled to exercise the right of voting for public officers, let it be impressed on your mind that God commands you to choose for rulers, just men who will rule in the fear of God.  The preservation of a republican government depends on the faithful discharge of this duty; if the citizens neglect their duty, and place unprincipled men in office, the government will soon be corrupted; laws will be made, not for the public good, so much as for selfish ….. purposes; corrupt or incompetent men will be appointed to execute the laws;  the public revenues will be squandered ……. ; and the rights of the citizens will be violated or disregarded.  If a republican government fails to secure public prosperity and happiness, it must be because the citizens neglect the divine commands, and elect bad men to make and administer the laws…..”

Right now we have presidential candidates in one party consisting of an avowed socialists who would radically alter our form of government to conform it to the failed model of the former USSR and a chronic liar who sacrificed the lives of brave men for political purposes and who seems to have no governing worldview except the pursuit of raw political power.

In the other party we have a narcissist as front-runner who has no solutions to any problem facing the country and no answers to any question except, “I’ve made a lot of money” and “I’m a great negotiator”; a candidate who professes Christianity, but whose life is totally devoid of the evidence for that faith.

Is this the best we can do?  Apparently so, because here we are in 2016, a nation who has abandoned sacrificing self-interest for the public good and exchanged that worldview for one based on envy, greed and entitlement; a nation that elects politicians, not on the content of their character, but solely on the basis of extravagant promises of free stuff.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, someone asked Alexandr Solzhenzisyn, the great Russian author how a people could have allowed the horror of seventy years of communism.  His answer:  “Its simple, we forgot God”.   Unless we remember the foundation of our Republic was a reliance on God, and start electing people whose lives reflect an adherence to those “General Principles of Christianity” as John Adams phrased it, someone in the future will give the same answer to the question, “How could we have allowed this to happen?”