Happy Independence Day

Officially, the Declaration was signed on the 2nd of July and John Adams even let his wife know he was certain the 2nd would be solemnized and celebrated for generations to come.

Oops.

The document went to print and was distributed on the 4th of July, which does have a ring to it, so “let freedom ring” and all that.

In all seriousness, in spite of the official day being the second, we were given the 4th to commemorate our Founder’s great act of Treason that turned into the birth of a new nation. Founded on principles you can read right in the Old and New Testament of the Holy Bible, and infused with the Enlightenment ideology which had its original roots in the same before it went wildly humanist, the Declaration of Independence was not a document thrown together in a huff of self-righteous fury over taxation without representation.

It was pondered over, every word considered, discarded, revised, and re-written until it rang with a force of Truth too loud to ignore. Then the continental congress got a hold of it and butchered it until Jefferson and the Committee of Five despaired of all the work they’d accomplished, but after much wrestling and struggling, the document was presented and approved unanimously by all thirteen colonies — then recognized as sovereign states.

Fun Fact: The original document written by Jefferson and his committee actually contained language that condemned, wholly and completely, the curse of slavery George III had refused to end. The wording went like this:

he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Original Draft of the Declaration of Independence written by Thomas Jefferson and the Committee of Five

The southern states rebelled against such harsh language and well…we know how that ended in 1865.

The final draft complete, it was signed by 56 individuals who came from 13 colonies, bathed in the signal fires of freedom from the outset. The Revolutionary War was referred to as the Presbyterian Revolt by our British brothers because freedom, equality, and the God-given rights of human beings was preached from the pulpits for over 150 years before the Declaration was written.

Once signed, those 56 men were fully aware that they had sealed their fates as either victors or traitors. A price on their head by the King of England was set high and the cost for many of them tragically steep.

Yet every one of them had the courage and conviction to sign their name to a document that condemned them to death and they even expressed a little macabre humor as they affixed their “John Hancock’s” to that beautiful parchment.

One third of the colonists were still fiercely loyal to England, another third would not choose sides. Outnumbered and outgunned, the rebel colonial army faced astronomical odds against them. Benjamin Franklin stated,

We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

Benjamin Franklin – attributed to

The room was solemn and grave as they pondered their decision, but humor did prevail for a moment in this interaction that was recorded for future generations to read:

In an 1811 letter to Adams, Benjamin Rush recounted the signing in stark fashion, describing it as a scene of “pensive and awful silence”. Rush said the delegates were called up, one after another, and then filed forward somberly to subscribe what each thought was their ensuing death warrant. He related that the “gloom of the morning” was briefly interrupted when the rotund Benjamin Harrison of Virginia said to a diminutive Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, at the signing table, “I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.” According to Rush, Harrison’s remark “procured a transient smile, but it was soon succeeded by the Solemnity with which the whole business was conducted.”

Indeed, the cost for each of them was high, and yet, they each fully and firmly agreed with the final passage of the Declaration which declared:

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Declaration of Independence

It’s raining today as I write this, on the 248th anniversary of that remarkable day. The fireworks and festivities of this evening may be cancelled due to the ongoing deluge, and in some ways, it feels apropos to the current state of These United States. The clown show that is our presidential election this year, the progressive agenda to destroy the nuclear family, marriage, religion, education, and every other God-ordained institution it touches. The mockery we’ve made of ourselves on the international stage, and the trillions of dollars of debt we’ve accrued in the pursuit of more government, more policing of nations, more special interest programs, and more tyranny.

We’ve lost our way and this year, the celebration doesn’t feel like much of a celebration.

Calvin Coolidge, one of the few great – and highly invisible – presidents of the modern age, had the privilege of giving a speech to commemorate the 150th anniversary of our nation’s founding. And his words are poignant as he celebrates what the Founders did while warning the American people of how fragile this freedom truly is.

It is not so much, then, for the purpose of undertaking to proclaim new theories and principles that this annual celebration is maintained, but rather to reaffirm and reestablish those old theories and principles which time and the unerring logic of events have demonstrated to be sound.

It is little wonder that people at home and abroad consider Independence Hall as hallowed ground and revere the Liberty Bell as a sacred relic. That pile of bricks and mortar, that mass of metal, might appear to the uninstructed as only the outgrown meeting place and the shattered bell of a former time, useless now because of more modern conveniences, but to those who know they have become consecrated by the use which men have made of them. They have long been identified with a great cause. They are the framework of a spiritual event. The world looks upon them, because of their associations of one hundred and fifty years ago, as it looks upon the Holy Land because of what took place there nineteen hundred years ago. Through use for a righteous purpose they have become sanctified.

But when we come to a contemplation of the immediate conception of the principles of human relationship which went into the Declaration of Independence we are not required to extend our search beyond our own shores. They are found in the texts, sermons, and the writings of the early colonial clergy who were earnestly undertaking to instruct their congregations in the great mystery of how to live. They preached equality because they believed in the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. They justified freedom by the text that we are all created in the divine image, all partakers of the divine spirit.

If this apprehension of the facts be correct, and the documentary evidence would appear to verify it, then certain conclusions are bound to follow. A spring will cease to flow if its source is dried up; a tree will wither if its roots be destroyed. In its main features, the Declaration of Independence is a great spiritual document. it is a declaration not of material but of spiritual conceptions. Equality, liberty, popular sovereignty, the rights of man — these are not elements which we can see and touch. They are ideals. They have their source and roots in the religious convictions. They belong to the unseen world. Unless the faith of the American people in these religious convictions is to endure, the principles of our Declaration will perish. We cannot continue to enjoy the result if we neglect and abandon the cause.

We are too prone to overlook another conclusion. Governments do not make ideals, but ideals make governments. This is both historically and logically true. Of course the government can help to sustain ideals and can create institutions through which they can be better observed, but their source by their very nature is in the people. The people have to bear their own responsibilities. There is no method by which that burden can be shifted to the government. it is not the enactment, but the observance of laws, that creates the character of a nation.

Calvin Coolidge, July 5, 1926

This Independence Day, let us take a more sober approach to the pomp and circumstance of the celebrations and realize that we are poised on a knife’s edge of destruction. Our Declaration of Independence is not worth the paper it was written on if We the People do not wake up to the foundational principles of Nature and Nature’s God. If He and His laws are not first in our hearts, we will see the setting of the sun over a nation that rejected its Divine Creator. And like Jefferson once stated regarding the ongoing curse of slavery on our blood-stained soil,

“And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia

I will end with this last statement by Coolidge that rang in my heart. I could just copy and paste the entire thing here, but his sentiments were shared by so many of our Founders and many more good men and women who fought to maintain our right to be free.

About the Declaration there is a finality that is exceedingly restful. It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning can not be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers.

Calvin Coolidge, July 5, 1926