“But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some sixty million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The prophetic words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn resonate like thunder across the history of man. “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.” Thus summarized the Nobel laureate, Orthodox Christian author, and Russian dissident the main reason why the communist revolution was able to enslave, terrorize, and murder tens of millions of innocent people. An atheistic mentality and a long process of secularization gradually alienated the people from God and His moral laws. This lead them away from truth and authentic liberty and facilitated the rise of tyranny.
Tragically that same process is now at work in America and many other parts of the world. Too many unfortunately refuse to see it or believe it.
America has long been a beacon of freedom for millions of souls who came here seeking liberty and opportunity. It achieved this unique place in history by recognizing the authority of God and His moral laws and declaring that men have the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Founded by faithful and God-fearing men who despised government tyranny and sought religious freedom and individual liberty, America incorporated these universally true principles in its Declaration of Independence and Constitution. These ideals eventually became the bedrock upon which all our laws, government, and institutions were originally built.all rights came from God alone, not governments
America’s Founding Fathers understood and proclaimed that all rights came from God alone, not governments. They insisted that government must always serve man and that man was created by God to be free. Their deep faith and reverence of the Almighty inspired and guided their actions and motivated their decisions. It is this belief and trust in God’s authority and wisdom that ultimately transformed America from a tiny British colony with a handful of refugees, to the mighty economic and military superpower and an oasis of freedom, opportunity, and prosperity for tens of millions of immigrants.
The Founding Fathers, like Solzhenitsyn, understood the dependence of freedom on morality. A virtuous and faithful people who placed God at the center of their lives and the foundations of their institutions helped America become that shining city on a hill “whose beacon light guides freedom-loving people everywhere”, said President Ronald Reagan. “We’ve staked the whole future of American civilization not on the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of each and all of us…to govern ourselves according to commandments of God. The future and success of America is not in this Constitution, but in the laws of God upon which the Constitution is founded,” wrote James Madison.Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people.
This same theme is found throughout the writings of the Founders. John Adams clearly understood that our “Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” “He who is void of virtuous attachments in private life is, or very soon will be, void of all regard for his country,” observed Samuel Adams. Patrick Henry wrote that “virtue, morality, and religion … is the armor that renders us invincible[.] … [I]f we lose these, we are conquered, fallen indeed[.] … [S]o long as our manners and principles remain sound, there is no danger.”
Solzhenitsyn warned that by forgetting God, America and the West faced a “calamity of a despiritualized and irreligious humanistic consciousness” that would weaken their foundations and make them vulnerable to moral decay and internal collapse. Only by turning back to God from the self-centered and atheistic humanism where “man is the touchstone [measure] in judging and evaluating everything on earth” would the West have any hope of escaping the destruction toward which it inevitably moves.
Unfortunately America did not heed Solzhenitsyn’s warnings. In the last several decades America has been rapidly transformed from a God-fearing and worshiping nation, into a secularist and atheistic society, where communist and atheistic ideals are glorified and promoted, while Judeo-Christian values and morality are attacked, ridiculed, and increasingly eradicated from the public and social consciousness of our nation. Under the decades-long assault and militant radicalism of many so-called “liberal” and “progressive” elites, God and His moral laws have been progressively erased from our public and educational institutions, to be replaced with all manner of delusion, perversion, corruption, violence, decadence, and insanity.Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.
“Those people who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants,” warned William Penn. Throughout history, the most serious threats to man’s freedom always arise when men refuse to acknowledge that God is ultimately the source and protector of real and lasting liberty and freedom. When that timeless truth is erased from men’s consciousness, when God’s wisdom and laws are forgotten, when morality is no longer a virtue to be treasured and emulated, when human life is no longer sacred, and man becomes the only standard of all that is true, then genuine freedom will begin to vanish from any group, institution, community, or society. Carnality, greed, selfishness, and worldly pleasure and power become the main goals of human existence. The moral and ethical clarity, conviction, and courage required to defend freedom and protect genuine liberty ultimately disappear, to be replaced by the most cruel, unethical, tyrannical, and godless ideologies.
Godlessness is always the first step to the concentration camp.
It is no coincidence that advocates and followers of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism – all secular, immoral, atheistic, and godless ideologies – enslaved and murdered the greatest number of people in the history of mankind. All produced some of the most cruel, violent, and evil tyrants this world has ever known, despots who persecuted their own citizens, slaughtered the innocent, destroyed their own people, and brought calamities to other nations. All subjugated the liberty and property of men to the absolute power and control of the state. All were enemies of God and blasphemers of His Holy Scriptures. All viciously persecuted the most devout and religious members of their societies, primarily the religious Christians and Jews who righteously and faithfully followed the Lord.
This is the lesson the 20th century expended so much blood to teach us. It appears that without a marked change in course, the Western world is going to have to learn it again.
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“Our life consists not in the pursuit of material success but in the quest for worthy spiritual growth. Our entire earthly existence is but a transitional stage in the movement toward something higher, and we must not stumble and fall, nor must we linger fruitlessly on one rung of the ladder. Material laws alone do not explain our life or give it direction. The laws of physics and physiology will never reveal the indisputable manner in which the Creator constantly, day in and day out, participates in the life of each of us, unfailingly granting us the energy of existence; when this assistance leaves us, we die. And in the life of our entire planet, the Divine Spirit surely moves with no less force: this we must grasp in our dark and terrible hour.”
–Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Templeton Address
“To be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave; and it usually happens to the appointment, and as it were retributive justice, of the Deity, that that people which cannot govern themselves, and moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their lusts, should be delivered up to the sway of those whom they abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude.”
–John Milton, Second Defense of the English People
Proverbs 14: 34: “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”
Anti-colonialism was one of the dominant political currents of the 20th century, as dozens of European colonies in Asia and Africa became free. Today we are still living with the aftermath of colonialism.
Apologists for terrorism, including Osama Bin Laden, argue that terrorist acts are an understandable attempt on the part of subjugated non-Western peoples to lash out against their longtime Western oppressors. Activists at the World Conference on Racism, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, have called for the West to pay reparations for slavery and colonialism to minorities and natives of the Third World.
These justifications of violence, and calls for monetary compensation, rely on a large body of scholarship that has been produced in the Western academy. This scholarship, which goes by the names of “anti-colonial studies,” “postcolonial studies,” or “subaltern studies,” is now an intellectual school in itself, and it exercises a powerful influence on the humanities and social sciences. The leading Western figures include Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin. The arguments of these Western scholars are supported by Third World intellectuals like Wole Soyinka, Chinweizu – who uses only one name, Ashis Nandy and, perhaps most influential of all, Frantz Fanon.
The assault against colonialism and its legacy has many dimensions, but at its core it is a theory of oppression that relies on three premises.
First, colonialism and imperialism are distinctively Western evils that were inflicted on the non-Western world. Second, as a consequence of colonialism, the West became rich and the colonies became impoverished; in short, the West succeeded at the expense of the colonies. Third, the descendants of colonialism are worse off than they would have been had colonialism never occurred.
In a widely used text, “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa,” the Marxist scholar Walter Rodney blames European colonialism for “draining African wealth and making it impossible to develop more rapidly the resources of the continent.” A similar note is struck by the African writer Chinweizu in his influential book “The West and the Rest of Us.” Chinweizu offers the following explanation for African poverty: “White hordes have sallied forth from their Western homelands to assault, loot, occupy, rule and exploit the world. Even now the fury of their expansionist assault upon the rest of us has not abated.”
In his classic work “The Wretched of the Earth,” Fanon writes, “European opulence has been founded on slavery. The well-being and progress of Europe have been built up with the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races.”
These notions are pervasive and emotionally appealing. By suggesting that the West became dominant because it is oppressive, they provide an explanation for Western global dominance without encouraging white racial arrogance. They relieve the Third World of blame for its wretchedness. Moreover, they imply politically egalitarian policy solutions: The West is in possession of the “stolen goods” of other cultures, and it has a moral and legal obligation to make some form of repayment.
I was raised to believe in such things, and among most Third World intellectuals they are articles of faith. The only problem is that they are not true.
There is nothing uniquely Western about colonialism. My native country of India, for example, was ruled by the British for more than two centuries, and many of my fellow Indians are still smarting about that. What they often forget, however, is that before the British came, the Indians were invaded and conquered by the Persians, by the Mongols, by the Turks, by Alexander the Great, by the Afghans and by the Arabs. Depending on how you count, the British were the eighth or ninth foreign power to invade India since ancient times. Indeed ancient India was itself settled by the Aryan people who came from the north and subjugated the dark-skinned indigenous people.
Those who identify colonialism and empire only with the West either have no sense of history, or they have forgotten about the Egyptian empire, the Persian empire, the Macedonian empire, the Islamic empire, the Mongol empire, the Chinese empire and the Aztec and Inca empires in the Americas. Shouldn’t the Arabs be paying reparations for their destruction of the Byzantine and Persian empires? Come to think of it, shouldn’t the Byzantine and Persian people also pay reparations to the descendants of the people they subjugated? And while we’re at it, shouldn’t the Muslims reimburse the Spaniards for their 700-year rule?
As the example of Islamic Spain suggests, the people of the West have participated in the game of conquest not only as the perpetrators, but also as the victims. Ancient Greece, for example, was conquered by Rome, and the Roman Empire itself was destroyed by invasions of Huns, Vandals, Lombards and Visigoths from northern Europe.
America, as we all know, was itself a colony of England before its war of independence; England, before that, was subdued and ruled by the Norman kings from France. Those of us living today are taking on a large project if we are going to settle upon a rule of social justice based upon figuring out whose ancestors did what to whom.
The West did not become rich and powerful through colonial oppression. It makes no sense to claim that the West grew rich and strong by conquering other countries and taking their stuff. How did the West manage to do this?
In the late Middle Ages, say the year 1500, the West was by no means the most affluent or most powerful civilization. Indeed the civilizations of China and of the Arab-Islamic world exceeded the West in wealth, in knowledge, in exploration, in learning and in military power. So how did the West gain so rapidly in economic, political, and military power that, by the 19th century, it was able to conquer virtually all the civilizations in the world? This question demands to be answered, and the oppression theorists have never provided an adequate explanation.
Moreover, the West could not have reached its current stage of wealth and influence by stealing from other cultures for the simple reason that there wasn’t very much to take. “Oh yes there was,” the retort often comes. “The Europeans stole the raw material to build their civilization. They took rubber from Malaya and cocoa from West Africa and tea from India.” But as economic historian P.T. Bauer points out, before British rule, there were no rubber trees in Malaya, nor cocoa trees in West Africa, nor tea in India. The British brought the rubber tree to Malaya from South America. They brought tea to India from China. And they taught the Africans to grow cocoa,a crop the native people had previously never heard of.
None of this is to deny that when the colonialists could exploit native resources, they did. But this larceny cannot possibly account for the enormous gap in economic, political and military power that opened up between the West and the rest of the world.
What, then, is the source of that power? The reason the West became so affluent and dominant in the modern era is that it invented three institutions:
science, democracy and capitalism. All these institutions are based on universal impulses and aspirations, but those aspirations were given a unique expression in Western civilization.
Consider science. It is based on a shared human trait: the desire to know. People in every culture have tried to learn about the world. Thus the Chinese recorded the eclipses, the Mayans developed a calendar, the Hindus discovered the number zero and so on. But science requires experiments, laboratories, induction, verification, and what one scholar has termed “the invention of invention” – the scientific method, this is a Western institution. Similarly, tribal participation is universal, but democracy – involving free elections, peaceful transitions of power, separation of powers – is a Western idea.
Finally, the impulse to trade is universal, and there is nothing Western about the use of money, but capitalism based on property rights, contracts, courts to enforce them, and, ultimately, limited-liability corporations, stock exchanges, patents, insurance, double-entry book keeping – this ensemble of practices was developed in the West.
It is the dynamic interaction between these three Western institutions – science, democracy and capitalism – that has produced the great wealth, strength, and success of Western civilization. An example of this interaction is technology, which arises out of the marriage between science and capitalism.
Science provides the knowledge that leads to invention, and capitalism supplies the mechanism by which the invention is transmitted to the larger society, as well as the economic incentive for inventors to continue to make new things.
Now we can understand better why the West was able, between the 16th and the 19th century, to subdue the rest of the world and bend it to its will. Indian elephants and Zulu spears were no match for British jeeps and rifles. Colonialism and imperialism are not the cause of the West’s success; they are the result of that success.
The wealth and power of European nations made them arrogant and stimulated their appetite for global conquest. Colonial possessions added to the prestige, and to a much lesser degree to the wealth, of Europe. But the primary cause of Western affluence and power is internal – the institutions of science, democracy, and capitalism acting in concert.
Consequently it is simply wrong to maintain that the rest of the world is poor because the West is rich, or that the West grew rich off “stolen goods” from Asia, Africa and Latin America, because the West created its own wealth, and still does.
The descendants of colonialism are better off than they would have been had colonialism never happened. I would like to illustrate this point through a personal example. While I was a young boy growing up in India, I noticed that my grandfather, who had lived under British colonialism, was instinctively and habitually anti-white. He wasn’t just against the English, he was generally against the white man. I realized that he had an anti-white animus that I did not share. This puzzled me: Why did he and I feel so differently?
Only years later, after a great deal of reflection and a fair amount of study, did the answer finally hit me. The reason for our difference of perception was that colonialism had been pretty bad for him, but pretty good for me. Another way to put it was that colonialism had injured those who lived under it, but paradoxically it proved beneficial to their descendants.
Much as it chagrins me to admit it – and much as it will outrage many Third World intellectuals for me to say it – my life would have been much worse had the British never ruled India.
How is this possible? Virtually everything that I am, what I do, and my deepest beliefs, all are the product of a world view that was brought to India by colonialism. I am a writer, and I write in English. My ability to do this, and to reach a broad market, is entirely thanks to the British.
My understanding of technology, which allows me, like so many Indians, to function successfully in the modern world, was entirely the product of a Western education that came to India as a result of the British. So also my beliefs in freedom of expression, in self-government, in equality of rights under the law and in the universal principle of human dignity – they are all the product of Western civilization.
I am not suggesting that it was the intention of the colonialists to give all these wonderful gifts to the Indians. Colonialism was not based on philanthropy: It was a form of conquest and rule. The English came to India to govern, and they were not primarily interested in the development of the natives, whom they viewed as picturesque savages. It is impossible to measure, or overlook, the pain and humiliation that was inflicted by the rulers over their long period of occupation. Understandably the Indians chafed under this yoke.
Toward the end of the British reign in India, Mahatma Gandhi was asked, “What do you think of Western civilization?” He replied, “I think it would be a good idea.”
Despite their suspect motives and bad behavior, however, the British needed a certain amount of infrastructure in order to effectively govern India. So they built roads, shipping docks, railway tracks, irrigation systems and government buildings. Then the British realized that they needed courts of law to adjudicate disputes that went beyond local systems of dispensing justice. And so the English legal system was introduced, with all its procedural novelties, such as “innocent until proven guilty.”
The English also had to educate the Indians, in order to communicate with them and to train them to be civil servants in the empire. Thus Indian children were exposed to Shakespeare, Dickens, Hobbes and Locke. They began to encounter words and ideas not in their ancestral culture: “liberty,” “sovereignty,” “rights” and so on.
This brings me to the greatest benefit that the British provided to the Indians: They taught them the language of freedom. Once again, it was not the objective of the English to encourage rebellion. But by exposing Indians to the ideas of the West, they did. The Indian leaders were the product of Western civilization. Gandhi studied in England and South Africa, Nehru was a product of Harrow and Cambridge. This exposure was not entirely to the good; Nehru, for example, who became India’s first prime minister after independence, was highly influenced by Fabian socialism through the teachings of Harold Laski. The result was that India had a mismanaged socialist economy for a generation.
But my broader point is that the champions of Indian independence acquired the principles and the language and even the strategies of liberation from the civilization of their oppressors. This was true not just of India but also of other Asian and African countries that broke free of the European yoke. My conclusion is that against their intentions, the colonialists brought things to India that have immeasurably enriched the lives of the descendants of colonialism.
It is doubtful that non-Western countries would have acquired these good things by themselves. It was the British who, applying a universal notion of human rights, in the early 19th century abolished the ancient Indian institution of sati – the custom of tossing widows on the funeral pyre of their dead husbands.
There is no reason to believe that the Indians, who had practiced sati for centuries, would have reached such a conclusion on their own. Imagine an African or Indian king encountering the works of Locke or Madison and saying, “You know, I think those fellows have a good point. I should relinquish my power and let my people decide whether they want me or someone else to rule.” Somehow, I don’t see this as likely.
Colonialism was the transmission belt that brought to Asia, Africa and South America the blessings of Western civilization. Many of those cultures continue to have serious problems of tyranny, tribal and religious conflict, poverty and underdevelopment, but this is not due to an excess of Western influence but to the fact that those countries are insufficiently Westernized.
Sub-Saharan Africa, which is probably in the worst position, has been described by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan as “a cocktail of disasters.” But this is not because colonialism in Africa lasted so long but because it lasted a mere half-century. It was too short to permit Western institutions to take firm root.
Consequently, after their independence most African nations have retreated into a kind of tribal barbarism that can be remedied only with more Western influence, not less. Africa needs more Western capital, more technology, more rule of law and more individual freedom.
None of this is to say that colonialism by itself was a good thing, only that bad institutions sometimes produce good results. Colonialism, I freely acknowledge, was a harsh regime for those who lived under it. My grandfather would have a hard time giving even one cheer for colonialism. As for me, I cannot manage three, but I am quite willing to grant two. So here it is: Two cheers for colonialism! Maybe you will now see why I am not going to be sending an invoice for reparations to Tony Blair.
Source:
Dinesh D’Souza, 2002 Sfgate.com
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This is my response:
Western/European colonialism also brought the Gospel of Jesus Christ–especially through Christian missionaries from Great Britain (the British Empire). Poverty, primarily, is a spiritual condition. A nation that has suffered from poverty for many generations or even centuries is because that nation is cursed. Begin to preach the Gospel to the people and the Light of Heaven comes into their lives and their lives are transformed. Also, prayer and fasting need to take place to break the curses off the land of that nation. Curses come through sin: devil worship, abortion (human sacrifice), sexual sin (homosexuality, adultery), earth worship, etc. Break the curses off that land and the Lord will bless the land.
I am the wealthiest man on the planet, not because I have much property or have millions or billions of dollars in a bank account. I am the wealthiest man on the planet because I have the Presence of God in my life. Thank you, Lord Jesus, for shedding your precious blood on the cross, so that I can have access to my heavenly Father. And because I have access to the Father, He can inspire me/reveal to me ideas to make my life better and other people’s lives better.
Many years ago, back in the 1600s, the great Christian intellectual, John Milton, wrote that because of the power and influence of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in Great Britain, the English language would be the dominant language of the world someday. On a similar note: I believe the Lord allowed Alexander the Great to conquer the Persian Empire because the Greek language is easier to learn than the Persian language. The Greek New Testament is still being studied today in 2021. That is the power of God in the affairs of men.
Devil worship defiles the land. After so many generations of devil worship, the land vomits. Thank God for colonialism and the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The Gospel of Jesus Christ is what breaks the curses off the land.
Maybe someday the Lord will destroy the monument to Crazy Horse with an earthquake. The Lord destroyed the mural of George Floyd with a bolt of lightning.
Leviticus 18:24-30: “Defile not ye yourselves in any of these things: for in all these the nations are defiled which I cast out before you: And the land is defiled: therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants. Ye shall therefore keep my statutes and my judgments, and shall not commit any of these abominations; neither any of your own nation, nor any stranger that sojourneth among you: (For all these abominations have the men of the land done, which were before you, and the land is defiled;) That the land spue not you out also, when ye defile it, as it spued out the nations that were before you. For whosoever shall commit any of these abominations, even the souls that commit them shall be cut off from among their people. Therefore shall ye keep mine ordinance, that ye commit not any one of these abominable customs, which were committed before you, and that ye defile not yourselves therein: I am the LORD your God.”
Leviticus 20:22-23: “Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out. And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them.”
II Kings 17:7-17: “For so it was, that the children of Israel had sinned against the LORD their God, which had brought them up out of the land of Egypt, from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods, And walked in the statutes of the heathen, whom the LORD cast out from before the children of Israel, and of the kings of Israel, which they had made. And the children of Israel did secretly those things that were not right against the LORD their God, and they built them high places in all their cities, from the tower of the watchmen to the fenced city. And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree: And there they burnt incense in all the high places, as did the heathen whom the LORD carried away before them; and wrought wicked things to provoke the LORD to anger: For they served idols, whereof the LORD had said unto them, Ye shall not do this thing. Yet the LORD testified against Israel, and against Judah, by all the prophets, and by all the seers, saying, Turn ye from your evil ways, and keep my commandments and my statutes, according to all the law which I commanded your fathers, and which I sent to you by my servants the prophets. Notwithstanding they would not hear, but hardened their necks, like to the neck of their fathers, that did not believe in the LORD their God. And they rejected his statutes, and his covenant that he made with their fathers, and his testimonies which he testified against them; and they followed vanity, and became vain, and went after the heathen that were round about them, concerning whom the LORD had charged them, that they should not do like them. And they left all the commandments of the LORD their God, and made them molten images, even two calves, and made a grove, and worshipped all the host of heaven, and served Baal. And they caused their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire, and used divination and enchantments, and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the LORD, to provoke him to anger.”
“To be free is the same thing as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate and just, to be frugal and abstinent, and lastly, to be magnanimous and brave; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave; and it usually happens to the appointment, and as it were retributive justice, of the Deity, that that people which cannot govern themselves, and moderate their passions, but crouch under the slavery of their lusts, should be delivered up to the sway of those whom they abhor, and made to submit to an involuntary servitude.”
–John Milton, Second Defense of the English People
Proverbs 14: 34: “Righteousness exalteth a nation: but sin is a reproach to any people.”
George S. Patton at the Virginia Military Institute, 1907.
General George S. Patton, Jr.
Donald Trump at the New York Military Academy, 1964.
President Donald Trump
If you look at the two photos of George Patton and the two photos of President Trump, there is a resemblance. Even if Trump doesn’t look exactly like Patton, I believe these photos are prophetic. Patton was a great warrior in World War II; Trump is a great warrior in a worldwide spiritual/political/intellectual war: Judaeo-Christianity versus Satanic Globalism (Deep State) (World War III?). Patton was a great battleaxe; Trump is a great battleaxe:
Jeremiah 51: 20-24: “Thou art my battle axe and weapons of war: for with thee will I break in pieces the nations, and with thee will I destroy kingdoms; And with thee will I break in pieces the horse and his rider; and with thee will I break in pieces the chariot and his rider; With thee also will I break in pieces man and woman; and with thee will I break in pieces old and young; and with thee will I break in pieces the young man and the maid; I will also break in pieces with thee the shepherd and his flock; and with thee will I break in pieces the husbandman and his yoke of oxen; and with thee will I break in pieces captains and rulers. And I will render unto Babylon and to all the inhabitants of Chaldea all their evil that they have done in Zion in your sight, saith the LORD.”
Trump standing in front of the British Union Jack is also prophetic. The Christianity exported from England (Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist, Quaker, Puritan, Independent) was a great influence on the original Thirteen Colonies and on the later development of the United States.
John Milton was a Christian and poet in the 1600’s. By age 44, he went blind. Milton wondered if he could continue serving God without eyesight. Sometimes, he simply felt useless.
Milton’s anxiety and grief spill out in his 19th sonnet: “When I consider how my light is spent.” The sonnet ends with the Lord’s wonderful ministry and comfort–
When I consider how my light is spent,
Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide;
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
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I have mentioned I’m in a season of rest. At least, I think that’s what it is. I know I’m not doing much in the way of study, projects, or anything else. Sometimes, I just feel like I’m wasting my life.
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On days when I feel like a broken, failed person, Milton’s words come back to me: “who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. […] They also serve who only stand and wait.” I love this image. In any court there are those coming and going. But there are also those who stand waiting for the king’s order. Activity is only useful if the king requests it. To busy oneself without the king’s command is not to serve Him but self.
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So it is with the King of kings. I am not my own. I am His. I wait for His Spirit to rouse me to action. ‘Til then, I stand, I wait, I listen for His word.
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This reminds me of another who sat listening to Jesus: Mary of Bethany. When Mary’s busy sister scolded her for not busying herself to serve Jesus, the Lord replied, “Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things,but one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen what is better and it will not be taken away from her” (Luke 10:41).
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In this season, I hope to know Jesus more: the one who is necessary, the one who is better than busy-ness. My prayer is that I value Him more than serving Him.
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg’d with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o’er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait.”
I John 2: 15-17: “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world passeth away, and the lust thereof: but he that doeth the will of God abideth for ever.”
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“For all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, and the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life.” Let us look at the origins of sin in the earth and go back to Genesis 3: 6: “And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant (Hebrew: “a desire”) to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her: and he did eat.”
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“The lust of the flesh”: “the tree was good for food.” “The lust of the eyes”: “it was pleasant to the eyes.” “The pride of life”: “a tree to be desired to make one wise.” Look at the word “desire”: it is a snare unto itself. Just because you are a Christian and you desire something doesn’t mean that it is God’s will that you have it. “But I have my needs!” Maybe your needs and your desires need to be put to death. Maybe the Lord wants you to be content with Him and Him alone before He deems it necessary to give you anything else.Before I got saved, my desire in life was to be a writer. I wrote a novella at the age of twenty-one, but it never got published. I wrote several short stories and some poetry, but was never published. I got saved at the age of twenty-two. At the age of twenty-five, I burned all of my manuscripts–somewhere between ten to fifteen legal pads and notebooks–because I wanted God and God alone (seek the kingdom of Heaven first).When I was twenty-eight, the Lord told me to go back to college. At Iowa State University, I majored in English Literature with a supporting field in Journalism and Mass Communications–I wrote a lot of papers and had a lot of essay tests. During college and just after college, I had a short story and two poems published (because it was God’s will) by Ethos magazine. When I was thirty-nine, the Lord told me to write a book about hitchhiking. Now, at the age of forty-five, I am working on a journal. I may be writing this journal for the rest of my life. I don’t see how it will ever be published, but there may be a few Christians out there who might appreciate it. If I get married and have children, then hopefully my children and descendents might get something out of it. If my journal glorifies God, then that is all that matters: the Lord will multiply my work and it will bear much fruit.The key thing is this: I was desperate for God, not my writing. When the Lord could see that I was wholly dedicated to Him and absolutely locked into Him, then He told me to start writing. Don’t get the cart before the horse: put God first. Then the Lord will provide the road and then the horse and then the cart and the destination where the goods need to be transported. Without God there is no road, there is no horse, there is no cart, there are no goods and there is no destination. Without God there is nothing.
My desire is to know God and to know Him more perfectly. The word “know” isn’t having knowledge of God, but to experience God, to abide in God, to have the Presence of God invade and permeate my body, soul and spirit. Without intimacy with God, I can do nothing for my fellow man. I cannot turn the world upside down for Christ.
If a light bulb has no electricity running through it, it cannot give light in a dark place. If a light bulb is broken, it is useless. If a light bulb is not screwed into the socket, it is useless. If a Christian is busy chasing the world and is not abiding in Christ, He is useless. If our light is darkness, then how great is that darkness?
One of my heroes of the Christian faith is John Milton (1608-1674). Why did his life and writings affect so many millions in England, America and the rest of the world? Because his desire was to know God and to know Him more perfectly.
Milton and the English Revolution
By Christopher Hill
“The civil war of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is a symbolic figure, has never been concluded. . . . Of no other poet is it so difficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without our theological and political dispositions, conscious and unconscious, inherited or acquired, making an unlawful entry.”
–T.S. Eliot, Milton (1947)
Page 1: “Milton is a more controversial figure than any other English poet. Many of the controversies relate to Milton’s participation in the seventeenth-century English Revolution, yet Milton is more controversial even than that Revolution itself. Those who dislike Milton dislike him very much indeed, on personal as well as political grounds. How could the American who proclaimed himself Royalist, Anglo-Catholic and classicist have any use for England’s republican anti-Catholic? Blake, Shelley and Herzen were more attuned to Milton: so were Jefferson, Mirabeau and the Chartists.
“Yet the controversies around Milton are not simple. He was, for instance, a propagandist of revolution, a defender of regicide* [killing of the king] and of the English republic. Dr. Johnson and many since have found it hard to forgive him for this, or to be fair to him. Yet Milton frequently expressed great contempt for the common people, and so cannot be whole-heartedly admired by modern democrats. He was a passionate anti-clerical, and in theology a very radical heretic. Since he was also a great Christian poet, ‘orthodox’ critics have frequently tried to explain away, or to deny, his heresies. We may feel that these attempts tell us more about the commentators than about Milton, but they have not been uninfluential. On the other hand, Milton’s radical theology is far from conforming to the sensibility of twentieth-century liberal Christians.”
Page 3: “It is, in my view, quite wrong to see Milton in relation to anything so vague and generalized as ‘the Christian tradition’. He was a radical Protestant heretic. He rejected Catholicism as anti-Christian: the papist was the only heretic excluded from his wide tolerance. Milton shed far more of mediaeval Catholicism than did the Church of England. His great theological system, the De Doctrina Christiana, arose by a divorcing command from the ambiguous chaos of traditional Christianity. Milton rejected the Trinity, infant baptism and most of the traditional ceremonies, including church marriage; he queried monogamy and believed that the soul died with the body. He cannot reasonably be claimed as ‘orthodox’.”
Page 4: “Milton was not just a fine writer. He is the greatest English revolutionary who is also a poet, the greatest English poet who is also a revolutionary.”
Pages 105 and 106: “Milton rejected not only ‘the corrupt and venal discipline of clergy courts’, but all ‘coercive jurisdiction in the church’. He thought not only that the Pope was Antichrist, but that bishops were more antichristian than the Pope. Like John Saltmarsh, he thought that any state church was necessarily antichristian. When he made Antichrist Mammon’s son Milton may even have hinted at social interpretations akin to those of Gerrard Winstanley. Milton pointed out that Christ used force only once—to drive money-changers out of the Temple. The coercive power of the secular magistrate in religious matters Milton similarly denied. ‘Since God became flesh’, John Reeve told the Lord Mayor of London in 1653, ‘no civil magistrate hath any authority from above to be judge of any man’s faith, because it is a spiritual invisible gift from God.’ Milton would have agreed with the conclusion. Repudiation of a state church divided sectaries from Episcopalians and Presbyterians; denial of the authority of the magistrate brought about a division somewhere farther to the left. In each case Milton came to be with the more radical party.
“If there is no distinction between clergy and laity, ordinary people have the right to interpret the Bible for themselves. This led to what Edwards called anti-Scripturism—criticism of the contradictions of the Bible, denial that it was the Word of God. Milton did not go so far as Clement Writer, Walwyn, some Ranters and the Quaker Samuel Fisher. But—unlike Edwards—he would have insisted on the principle that the individual had a right and indeed a duty to study the Bible for himself, not taking his religion at second hand from Pope, church or priest. He likewise insisted that ‘the spirit of God, promised alike and given / To all believers’ was the test for interpreting the letter of the Bible. Such ‘spiritual illumination . . . is common to all men.’ The distinction is a narrow one between his position and the Ranter and Quaker view that the spirit within believers was superior to the letter of Scripture, overriding it.
“Milton’s belief that worship is discussion, that the spirit in man is more important than any ecclesiastical authority, that each of us must interpret the Bible for himself, thus aligns him with Ranters, Quakers, antinomians: so does his conviction that men and women should strive to attain perfection on earth, even though Milton did not think they could ever succeed. His ultimate belief in the necessity of good works for salvation, the consequence of his emphasis on human freedom, aligns him with Arminians of the left like John Goodwin, General Baptists and Quakers, whilst his total rejection of sacramentalism and a state church puts him at the opposite pole to the Laudian ‘Arminians’ of the right. Milton accepted the heresy of adult baptism, at a time when the medical reformer William Rand thought that Henry Lawrence’s publication of his Treatise of Baptism was a more courageous act than risking his life on the field of battle. This links Milton with Socinians and Anabaptists, though he seems to have joined no Baptist congregation. His decisive rejection of sabbatarianism also puts him beyond the pale of ‘respectable’ Puritanism.
“Milton was a radical millenarian long before Fifth Monarchism was thought of: he equated monarchy with Antichrist. In 1641, he associated his belief that Christ’s kingdom ‘is now at hand’ with his confidence in the potentialities of free and democratic discussion. He had a vision of England as leader of an international revolution, which links him both with the Fifth Monarchists and with the pre-pacifist George Fox, who in 1657 rebuked the English army for not yet having sacked Rome.”
Pages 299 and 300: “The doctrine of the sonship of all believers is of course Biblical. ‘As many as are led by the Spirit of God, they are the Sons of God’, St. Paul said (Romans 8: 14). It is therefore accepted by all Protestants, and is mentioned in the Westminster Confession of Faith of 1647. But the emphasis I have been citing was especially characteristic of the radicals. In the early seventeenth century the covenant of John Smyth’s General Baptist church declared ‘We shall be his sons, calling him Father by the spirit whereby we are sealed.’ The church believed that ‘Christ’s redemption stretcheth to all men.’ This version of the doctrine, as Milton very well knew, trembled on the edge of antinomianism. ‘What have we, Sons of God, to do with Law?’ Many of his contemporaries were pushing it over the edge, as Thomas Munzer had done a century earlier when he said ‘We must all become gods.’
“Edwards quoted sectaries who said ‘Every creature is God. . . . A man baptized with the Holy Ghost knows all things even as God knows all things.’ Winstanley in 1648 believed that ‘God now appears in the flesh of the saints.’ Jesus Christ and his saints make one perfect man. He soon extended this from the saints to all mankind. ‘Every creature . . . is a Son to the Father.’ The same spirit that filled Christ ‘should in these last days be sent into whole mankind’. ‘Christ . . . is now beginning to fill every man and woman with himself.’ This Christ in everyone, ‘that perfect man, shall be no other but God manifest in the flesh’. ‘He will spread himself in sons and daughters . . . till this vine hath filled the earth.’ ‘Everyone that is subject to reason’s law’, Winstanley declared, ‘shall enjoy the benefit of sonship’—which for him meant participation in communal ownership and cultivation.
“George Fox criticized Ranters who claimed to be equal with God, but he himself was accused of affirming ‘that he had the divinity essentially in him’, ‘that he was equal with God, . . . that he was as upright as Christ’. Ranters and Quakers blended Familist and Hermeticist traditions in a very democratic mixture. The Hermetic texts described how man could discover the divine within himself, and through knowledge become like God. ‘A man on earth is a mortal God; . . . a God in heaven is an immortal man.’ In Paradise Lost the Father himself seems to recall some such idea when he tells the angels ironically
O Sons, like one of us man is become
To know both good and evil, since his taste
Of that defended fruit.
(XI. 84-6)
“The Hermeticist doctrine had been taken over by the Familists, who believed that every member of the Family of Love by obedience of love became a Son of God. Or, as Croll put it, man ‘riseth to such perfection that he is made the Son of God, transformed into the same image which is God and made one with him’. Robert Fludd taught that heaven was attainable on earth. ‘The Rosicrucians call one another brethren because they are the Sons of God’ in this sense. Christ dwells in man ‘and each man is a living stone of that spiritual rock’. Of these the true Temple will be constructed, of which the temples of Moses and of Solomon were only types. ‘When the Temple is consecrated, its dead stones will live . . . and man will recover his primitive state of innocence and perfection.’ This may perhaps enrich our sense of the scene in Paradise Regained when the Son of God miraculously stands on the pinnacle of the Temple. ‘The Son and the saints make one perfect man’, declared William Erbery; ‘the fullness of the godhead dwells in both in the same measure, though not in the same manifestation. . . . The fullness of the godhead shall be manifested in the flesh of the saints as in the flesh of the Son’—i.e. on earth.”
Page 307: “This is the basis for Milton’s theory of toleration: no Protestant ‘of what sect soever, following Scripture only, . . . ought, by the common doctrine of protestants, to be forced or molested for religion’. ‘No man in religion is properly a heretic at this day but he who maintains traditions or opinions not probable by Scripture (who, for aught I know, is the papist only’) (cf. Luther: ‘Neither pope nor bishop nor anyone else has the right to impose so much as a single syllable of obligation upon a Christian man without his own consent.’) ‘Chiefly for this cause do all true protestants account the Pope antichrist’, Milton continued; ‘for that he assumes to himself this infallibility over both the conscience and the Scripture.’ Hence the arguments for complete toleration for all Protestants do not apply to papists.
“A great many conclusions follow from this absolute emphasis on conscience, on sincerity. The efficacy of any sacrament depends on the proper attitude of the recipient, and therefore ‘Infants are not fit for baptism’, since ‘they cannot believe or undertake an obligation.’ Attendance at church is not necessary: ‘the worship of the heart is accepted by God even where external forms are not in all respects observed.’ But Samson Agonistes suggests that Milton agreed with Muggleton that we should abstain from attending the worship of the restored Church of England.”
Page 309: “Many radicals spoke in Joachite terms of three advents of Christ—first in the flesh in Palestine, finally in the Last Judgment, but in between there will be a ‘middle advent’ when Christ rises in believers. Or there are three resurrections of the dead—the first of Jesus in A.D. 33, the last at the general resurrection: in between comes the rule of the saints in the new dispensation. For Winstanley Christ’s resurrection is not in one single person. ‘Mankind is the earth that contains him buried, and out of this earth he is to rise’, within us. ‘The rising up of Christ in sons and daughters . . . is his second coming.’ Every saint is a true heaven, because God dwells in him and he in God, and the communion of saints is a true heaven. For Ranters too Christ’s coming meant ‘his coming into men by his spirit’. Fludd had believed that man could attain to heaven on earth. Seekers, Saltmarsh, Dell, Quakers and Muggletonians held similar views. Erbery, whose views are close to those of Milton on many points, believed that the Second Coming meant ‘the appearing of that great God and Saviour in the saints. . . .The saints shall judge the world, that is first destroy but afterwards save and govern the world.’”
Page 314: “On the dictionary definition it is difficult to say that Milton was not an antinomian. Like the Ranters he believed that ‘the entire Mosaic Law is abolished’—not just the ceremonial law but ‘the whole positive law of Moses’. Milton indeed wore his antinomianism with a difference, for he thought that ‘the law is now inscribed on believers’ hearts by the spirit’; but many whom we call antinomians would have said the same, and for Milton when the spirit is at variance with the letter ‘faith not law is our rule’.”
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*In the spring semester of 1995, I took a class on John Milton (1608-1674) at Iowa State University. I wrote a ten-page paper on Milton for that class.
Because of Milton’s writings (his essays like Areopagitica, A Second Defense of the English People and On Christian Doctrine) and influence with the Puritans of the American colonies, I came to the conclusion that he was a father of the United States of America.
If there had never been an English Civil War (1642-1651) or a Glorious Revolution (1688) (and the English Bill of Rights in 1689), there might never have been an American Revolutionary War (1775-1783) or the U.S. Constitution (1787).
I believe that John Milton and George Fox were by far the most influential men in seventeenth-century England. Milton was a great Christian intellectual/writer; Fox was a great preacher/apostle of the Gospel; they both spent time in prison for their beliefs.
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Antinomian—“One who holds that, under the gospel dispensation, the moral law is of no use or obligation, faith alone being necessary to salvation.”
Sabbatarian—“One who keeps the seventh day of the week as holy, in conformity with the letter of the fourth commandment.”
Arminian—“Of or pertaining to James Arminius (1560-1609), a Dutch protestant against the tenets of strict Calvinism. The theology of the Wesleyans of Great Britain and Methodists of America is Arminian.”
—Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
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“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart. The really great men must, I think, have great sadness on earth.”
The Road 