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Archive for August, 2013

The “principall Ende of this Plantacion”

Posted in Establishments, The Church in America, The Social Status of the Church on August 21, 2013| Leave a Comment »

1629_seal_Massachusetts_Bay_Colony_MassachusettsArchivesThe following is an excerpt from The Charter of Massachusetts Bay, 1629.  The royal charter, in the name of “CHARLES, BY THE, GRACE, OF GOD, Kinge of England, Scotland, Fraunce, and Ireland, Defendor of the Fayth, &c.” was drafted with the view that the “said People, Inhabitants there, may be soe religiously, peaceablie, and civilly governed, as their good Life and orderlie Conversacon, maie wynn and incite the Natives of Country, to the KnowIedg and Obedience of the onlie true God and Sauior of Mankinde, and the Christian Fayth, which in our Royall Intencon, and the Adventurers free Profession, is the principall Ende of this Plantacion.”

Alas, “from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed” (Lam. 1:6).

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The bearing Christianity on public office

Posted in Establishments, Thomas Chalmers on August 6, 2013| Leave a Comment »

Below, Chalmers makes a compelling case against the notion that a Christian ruler must leave his religion at the door of public office.  Men are men, privately and publicly.  And Christian men must be Christian men wherever they go, advocating good and resisting evil according to their place and calling:

“A righteous and religious monarch, or righteous and religious senators, must impress their character on their acts; nor can we understand the distinction, or rather the disjunction, which is spoken of in these days, between Christian governors and a Christian government. We have no such notion of the moral that we have of the physical chemistry, in the compounds of which, the properties of the ingredients may be changed or disappear. The corporation of a state cannot be thus denaturalised, or reduced to a sort of caput mortuum, discharged of all soul and all sentiment—as if by a process of constitution-making in the crucibles of a laboratory. The cold metaphysical abstraction that is thereby engendered, may exist in the region of the ideal; but it does not exist in the region of the actual, nor even in the region of the possible; for men, though convened within the hall of a legislative assembly, will not, therefore, forget that they are men; or think that they must renounce all care for the highest well-being of families, when called to deliberate on the well-being of a nation.”

Hardly rocket science.

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