We
are waiting for one of our renters to move and today was a good sign. She had a
big poster on the front door that said, “The Witch Is “IN””. Now the poster is taken down. Maybe the witch is out!
I remember sitting alongside one of
our exchange students who was taking American History at our high school. He had trouble with the history texts because
historians write in flowery cliché-ridden style, unlike, say, the chemistry or
algebra book. And his English being
devoid of all those expressions made History class difficult. It was the first part of the year so colonial
America was the topic. There in big
boldface was the story of the Salem witch trials. Indeed, 21 women were put to
death in those trials, but my exchange kid looked up at me and said, “That was
nothing for that era.” He is utterly correct.
During the same period in Europe, the bubonic plague was sweeping the
country and people theorized that vampires bit people at night or witches cast
spells causing the Black Death. From late
1660’s to early 1720’s, 500,000 people were put to death for suspected
witchcraft in Europe.
The thing I noticed about the
History text’s story was that it was never noted how the Salem trials
stopped. It ended when two pastors went
to the Massachusett’s judges and demanded it stop. The judges then went to church and publicly repented tearfully over what
they had done. We see this story over
and over again. When justice by the government
was not right, Christians step in.
Such is historic revisionism of the
left. The real story was that the church
was not responsible for the witch trials and made them stop. The leftist texts of today blame Christian
Puritans as fanatics who perpetrated the trials.
Let me give another example.
Benjamin Rush. Ever heard of him? No? He was listed by the other couple hundred
leaders of the Revolution as instrumental as Washington and Jefferson. They were the Big 3. The painter of the day whose 4 pictures of
the founding fathers are in the US Capitol (signing of the Constitution, etc.), William
Trumbull always put Rush in the foreground with Washington, Franklin, Jefferson
and Adams.
Rush was an educator from Pennsylvania
who founded 5 colleges (Good grief! You’d think that would get him at least an
honorable mention with the NEA.) He started the first medical school in the
colonies and was the head medic of the troops under Washington. Washington
called his service indispensible and that it saved the Revolution because the
soldiers were so poorly equipped. Rush
was a signer of the Declaration of Independence. He was a strong Christian and
an abolitionist of slavery. By 1776 he had spread his beliefs to abolish
slavery to 4 other states—MA, CT, RI, VT.
And he is voice of the original Constitution that had scheduled an end
to slavery by 1807. (Good grief! You’d
think the NAACP would be howling at those textbook writers about his deletion.)
He was a strong Christian of extraordinary witness. When 7 colonial states, in 1762, adopted an initiative
to share the gospel with the Indians and print bibles, the British King, head
of the Anglican church was suspicious, especially of Pennsylvania Quakers who
were constant dissidents in England. He
outlawed mission societies and Bible societies.
(Samuel Adams and others got so mad that this motivated them to join the
movement to revolt) This move ticked off the colonists more than anything else,
because they knew from experience that a Christian Indian was a good neighbor
rather than a threat. Rush was the center of the controversy.
After the Revolution, Rush went on
to found the Sunday School Movement in America, a mission to educate kids who
were forced to work long hours during
the week by giving them schooling on Sunday.
He was among founders of the
American Bible Society. Why? First was personal revelation that this was
God’s will for him to print Bibles.
Second was a besrock belief that society would become more civilized as
a result of it. His chief ally in the
Constitutional Convention was Pennsylvania Governor Morris who was the most
active speaker of the Convention and the guy who actually wrote the majority of
it. So a lot of the “consent of the
governed”, “separation of powers”, and “inalienable rights” were the ideas of
Benjamin Rush. He told the post-Revolutionary French they needed to teach
religion in their schools. (Not so well accepted since the French revolution
had guillotined or forced atheistic conversion of nearly 10,000 clergymen and
forced another 20,000 to flee the country so that by the time of Napoleon,
France was basically without churches.) Not so well accepted by liberal revisionist
historians either.
Adams and Jefferson were political
rivals and founded Federalist and Republican-Democrat factions among the early
leaders—and grew to be enemies. One night
Rush had a dream that both men would be friends, that they would be remembered
both as heros of the founding in the future, and they would die on the 50th
anniversary of the Declaration. He approached
them both to resolve their differences.
They did and began to write back and forth constantly in one of the most
touching and studied correspondences in our history. And on July 4, 1826 both the two old friends
died stunningly on the same day, 50 years to the day after the announcement of
the Declaration to the public.
I was thinking of getting one of
those bumper stickers that say, “Rush is Right” (Ahem! Guess who Limbaugh was
named after.) and then putting another sticker in front of it that says “Benjamin”. Do you think any of those highly intellectual
nuanced liberals will understand it?
Hello! Is the Witch still in?
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