America's Christian Beginnings

by Inez Comparet

In a brief period of time the United States, the mightiest nation in all of history, grew out of a handful of people in the wilderness. Our military might has held back the enormous hordes of Asia that seek to enslave the world under communism. Our wealth rebuilt the lands devastated by war, even the lands of our enemies, we have also fed half of the world. What power could produce this miracle? Only the fact that America was created a Christian nation, with Christian ideals.

Just what is Americanism, have you ever tried to define it? For our wisdom and for our survival, we should examine our principles, where shall we find the definition of Americanism? Should we go to the minority groups, who themselves say, “We are different, separate, a minority whose different ways of life, and different ideals must be given separate recognition.” Shall we accept this difference and incorporate it into our way of life?

No, we should maintain our religion, Christianity, culture and way of life that has made us great! These minority groups have no understanding of, or sympathy with Americanism. Should we listen to the brainwashed youths, turned out by our schools who have had no experience of life, who know nothing but what their teachers tell them? These students can only parrot what they are told should be our way of life.

The answer to this question is a resounding no! They know nothing about our way of life and what brought it about. For answers we must ask those who made this miracle. Americanism is not a theory, evolved by liberal professors in their attempt to remake the world in their own image. It is a way of life, it cannot be merely taught or theorized, it must be lived. No person can teach it or define it unless he has lived it. We must get our definition from those who made the American way of life.

Three centuries ago, a tiny handful of men and women faced life on a strange continent. They had no homes but what they could build with their own hands, before winter came. They had scanty food, and they did not know yet what crops would thrive in this new climate. They faced the daily hazards of an inhospitable wilderness, peopled by cruel savages. They weren’t supported by government subsidies, they received no wealth from the taxpayers of another nation. Yet, out of the wilderness, they started to build the greatest nation the world has ever seen. How did they do it, what were the tools they used? The answer to this will be the definition of Americanism.

America was founded by Christian people. So eamest were they in their insistence upon pure Christianity, that they left their comfortable homes, their farms and their shops in the lands of their ancestors. They crossed a broad and dangerous ocean to build, in the wilderness, a new civilization dedicated to Christianity. In the Mayflower Compact they wrote the purpose of their coming to the new world, in these words. “Having undertaken, for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith and the honor of our king and country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia.”

America was founded on Christianity. How did they build on that foundation? Consistent with their faith they built a Christian government. For example, most of the thirten original colonies gave religious tests for public office.

DELAWARE by the constitution of 1776, required every office holder to make the following declaration. “I do profess faith in God the Father, and Jesus Christ His only Son, and in the Holy Ghost, one God, blessed forevermore: and I do acknowledge the holy scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration.”

MASSACHUSETTS required the declaration, “I believe the Christian religion and have a firm persuasion of its truth.”

MARYLAND by the constitution of 1776, every person appointed to any office had to take an official oath of allegiance to the state, and also to subscribe a declaration of belief in the Christian religion.

NEW JERSEY declared that no Protestant inhabitant of this colony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil right merely on account of his religious principles, but that all persons professing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect, who shall demean themselves peaceably under the government as hereby established, shall be capable of being directed into any office of profit or trust, or being a member of either branch of the legislature.

VERMONT’S constitution required every member of the House of Representatives to take this oath. “I do believe in one God, the creator and governor of the universe, the rewarder of the good and punisher of the wicked, and I do acknowledge the scriptures of the Old and New Testaments to be given by divine inspiration, and own and profess the Protestant religion.”

NORTH CAROLINA by the constitution of 1776 provided, “That no person who shall deny the being of God or the truth of the Protestant religion, or the divine authority either of the Old or New Testaments, shall be capable of holding any office or place of trust or profit in the civil department of this state.

SOUTH CAROLINA by the constitution of 1776, provided that no person should be eligible to the Senate or House of Representatives unless he be of the Protestant religion.

VIRGINIA denied public office to anyone who denied the Christian religion to be true, or the holy scriptures of Old and New Testaments to be of divine authority.

The first schools were founded to give Christian education to their children, so that all who might come to positions of leadership would be firmly grounded in Christianity. For example, King’s College, which is now Columbia University advertised, “The chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God and Jesus Christ, and to live with a perfect heart, and a willing mind.”

Amherst, Dartmouth and Yale were established for training in the Christian faith. For the first century forty percent of Yale’s graduates became ministers of the gospel.

Mr. Harvard, in founding Harvard University said this. “Let every student be plainly instructed and earnestly pressed to consider well the main end of his life and studies is, to know God and Jesus Christ which is eternal life, and therefore to lay Christ in the bottom as the only foundation of all sound knowledge and learning.”

Horace Mann, the father of the American public schools system declared, “Moral education is a primal necessity of social existence. The grand result in practical morals, can never be attained without religion and no community will ever be religious without religious education. Had the Board required me to exclude either the Bible or religious instruction from the schools, I certainly should have given them the earliest opportunity to appoint my successor.”

By contrast today, many of our states prohibit the reading of the Bible in our public schools. What benefit can they hope to gain by being ashamed of Yahweh? The following verse from Jeremiah 8:9, in the Ferrer Fenton translation of the Bible seems to apply to them. “Your educated cause shame, terror and disgrace, for they reject the word of the Ever Living, and what can their education do for them?”

Today the United States needs more men who realize that the independence of our nation was established by statesmen unashamed to acknowledge their dependence upon Yahweh. George Washington, in directing that Sunday church services be held for soldiers said, “To the distinguished character of patriot it should be our highest glory to add the more distinguished character of Christian.”

Our nation was born in dangerous times and could not have survived them if not founded on Yahweh’s truth. As a Christian nation we became great, our power never weakened until our faith was weakened. The road to survival is the same one we followed to greatness. As a Christian nation we rose and as a Christian nation we shall stand forever.

Critical note by Clifton A. Emahiser: Now that we know something concerning the origin of the Christian beginnings of our nation from Inez Comparet, it would be well to consider the origin of the kind of law our founding fathers elected to adopt. I will now quote a segment from the book, Father Abraham’s Children, by Perry Edwards Powell, Ph. D., pages 102-103: “... It is enough to say that we have nothing so savory in the ancient past of old Britain. Perhaps that is the reason that our schools pass over the founding of the British Empire by Trojan-Welsh. But some time the whole story will be written and told.

“Brutus reigned praiseworthily for twenty-four years. Then Britain was divided as today. Locrin, the eldest son, received the choicest portion, England, for fifteen hundred years called Loegria; Camber inherited the western division called after his name Cambria, now Wales; and Albanact the rest or northern portion drew, then and even now spoken of as Albany, or Albania, now Scotland. Locrin was the over-king. The great work of Brutus is with us today. Lord Chief Justice Cope of England affirms; ‘The original laws of the land were composed of such elements that Brutus first selected from the ancient Greek and Trojan institutions.’ And in the same strain writes Lord Chancellor Fortescu, ‘So the kingdom of Britain had its origin from Brutus of the Trojans, who attended him from Greece and Italy and wove a mixed government, compounded of the regal and the democratic.’

“The Roman writers and travellers after much experience admit that Britons (Cymry) had laws that excelled their own, and were highly skilled in agriculture. ‘The extraordinary similarity that exist between many of our early laws’, says Yeatman, ‘and those of the Israelites might raise an inference that they were copied from them after the introduction of Christianity, but positive evidence exists of their pre-existence.’ The common law is identical in principal with what was known as the Law of the Lord as given in the books of Exodus.’ The British system of law is superior to any other European system although several countries were more benefitted by Rome.”

BRITAIN’S LAWS: From all of this we can see, while most of the continent of Europe struggled under Roman law which was later codified by Justinian, Britain was thriving on laws based on the laws of Yahweh. For more on British law, I am going to quote from, Celt, Druid and Culdee, by Isabel Hill Elder, pages 25, 49, and 77:

Page 25- “Another point on which Britain differs from other countries is that she has ever maintained the Common Law which holds a person under trial innocent until proven guilty, whereas the Continental nations maintain the Civil Law [of Justinian] which holds him guilty until proven innocent.”

Page 49- “That the Britons adopted anything they thought good from the Romans is perfectly true; they did not, however, abandon any of their old essential laws and customs and still less their religion. But it is untrue to say that the Britons had no previous civilization of their own as it is to pretend that Roman laws and customs permanently established themselves in Britain and remained after the legions were withdrawn. There is sufficient evidence to prove that the ancestors of the British, centuries before the Romans gained a footing in these islands, were a polished and intellectual people, skilled in arms as well as in learning, with a system of jurisprudence of their own superior, even to the laws of Rome.”

Page 77- “Cusack says that the whole system of government and legislation was patriarchal — indicative of an Eastern origin — and that in the Brehon laws, said to be the oldest code of laws in Europe, there are evidences which look very like a trace of Jewish (sic Judah-Zerah) tradition.”

“Another writer affirms that the Brehon Code in parts is a re-publication of the Mosaic law which declared that the first-born of every creature, including the first-born of man, was to be presented to the Lord (Exod. 13:2; Num. 18:15) ...”

So we have to ask, When our Congressmen and Senators speak of the “rule of law”, to which law (Common or Justinian) are they referring? (Dan. 7:25)