7/24/2023 0 Comments Errand into the wilderness meaningThe 1639 “Fundamental Orders of Connecticut””the first written constitution in the modern sense of the term drawn up by popular convention and the first to embody the democratic idea”states in its prolegomena that the state owes its origin to “the wise disposition of the divine providence” and that “the word of God” requires “an orderly and decent Government established according to God” to “maintain and preserve the liberty and purity of the Gospel.” Where specific provision was not laid down, magistrates were to administer justice according to the rule of the word of God,” and both governor and magistrates swore to act “according to the rule of God’s word.” No one who studies the key constitutional documents in American history can doubt for a moment the central and organic part played by religion in the origins and development of American republican government. Those sailing on the Mayflower in 1620 “for the Glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith” stated their desire “solemnly and mutually in the presence of God” to “covenant and combine ourselves together in a civill body politic.” But where, in the old world, state authority drew its divine sanction from traditional sacral kingship, in America it took the form of conscious dedication by democratic assemblies expressed in formal documents. So, in a sense, did all Christian nations. It was inevitable that such elect nation builders should place their government in a religious frame. You shall have made this island, which is but the suburbs of the old world, a bridge, a gallery to the new to join all to that world that shall never grow old, the kingdom of heaven.” Governor Winthrop, sailing the Atlantic on the Arabella, wrote, “We shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” God taught us to make ships, not to transport ourselves, but to transport Him. Paul’s, declared, “Act over the Acts of the Apostles be you a Light to the Gentiles, that sit in darkness. In a sermon to the Virginia Company in 1622, the poet John Donne, dean of St. The explorer and navigator John Davis stated, “There is no doubt but that we of England are this saved people, by the eternal and infallible presence of the Lord predestined to be sent unto these Gentiles in the sea, to those Isles and famous Kingdoms, there to preach the peace of the Lord.” The Virginia colony was to be the greatest experiment in post European Christianity. The myth was most tenaciously held among the Protestant sectarians, especially the colonists. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, most English people believed that their country had received Christianity directly from Christ’s disciple Joseph of Arimathea, that the Emperor Constantine was British (his mother Helena being daughter of the British King Coilus), and that he had Christianized the whole civilized world, as Foxe put it, “by the help of the British army.” The work most widely read among them, after the Bible, was Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, which vigorously expressed the dynamic myth that the English were the Elect Nation. The notion of a chosen but flawed people is directly related to America’s historical origins, for the first settlers were undoubtedly animated by a sense of divine mission. There is danger lest the enchantments of this world make them forget their errand into the wilderness.” They are inclined to agree with Cotton Mather, who made the point as long ago as 1702 while documenting what he termed “Christ’s great deeds in America” that “ religion brought forth prosperity, and the daughter destroyed the mother. But visitors from old Europe are struck by the way in which high church attendance and an often blatant religiosity coexist with the passionate pursuit of materialism. That the Americans are exceptional in their attitude to religion is obvious to all, and never more so than today. It perfectly expresses the close but at the same time slightly uneasy relationship between the American republic and the religious spirit. When Abraham Lincoln called Americans “the almost chosen people,” he used an apt phrase, as valid now as when he coined it a hundred and forty years ago.
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