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When America’s Founders wrote and approved our Declaration of Independence they understood something most of us were never taught. That is, only a people who walk by internal self-government are qualified to maintain external civil government. Because they had been reared in the Biblical thinking of the Great Awakening, they understood that governing one’s self by the power of the Holy Spirit within was the only foundation of good civil government. A people who are not controlled by their own principles of morality will have to be controlled by a large civil government. And a large civil government means less liberty for the individual, the family, the church, and society as a whole.
Robert Winthrop, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the mid-1800’s stated it precisely when he said,
“All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they have of stringent State Government, the more they must have of individual self-government. The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint.
“Men, in a word, must necessarily be controlled either by a power within them, or a power without them; either by the word of God, or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”
(Winthrop, Robert Charles. May 28, 1849, in an address, entitled “Either by the Bible or the Bayonet,” at the Annual Meeting of the Mass. Bible Society in Boston. Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions (Boston: Little, Brown & Company, 1852), p. 172. Marshall Foster and Mary-Elaine Swanson, The American Covenant – The Untold Story (Roseburg, OR: Fd. for Christian Self-Government, 1981; Thousand Oaks, CA: The Mayflower Institute, 1992), p. 7.)
But how are we to develop internal self-government? First we must receive Christ as our Master and Deliverer from the sin which would keep us from being self-governed. Continue reading
