In The Great Controversy, which was sent to me by an unknown, I’m thinking perhaps voices of the past, I studied the U. S. Constitution and felt voices of the past were speaking to me. I had a bigger than life calling.
This morning I read in The Great Controversy, “The Pilgrim Fathers.” The Church of England followed many dictates of the Holy Catholic Church. In the beginning, Christianity sought to supplement the authority of God with the church, I read. Authority is a word that rings an alarm bell in me, and for good reason. My father, who never saw a good quality in me, referred to my disobedience as the story of Adam and Eve, who ate the forbidden fruit.
The early Christian Church “began by enjoining what God had not forbidden, and ended by forbidding what God had explicitly enjoined,” I read—my father, the unquestioned authority, who never saw a good quality in me, I can relate to the Pilgrims. “Many earnestly desired to return to the purity and simplicity which characterized the primitive church. They regarded many of the established customs of the English Church as monuments of idolatry, and they could not in conscience unite in her worship. But the church, being supported by the civil authority, would permit no dissent from authority, would permit no dissent from her forms. Attendance upon her service was required by law, and unauthorized assemblies for religious worship were prohibited, under penalty of imprisonment, exile, and death.”
“In their flight, they had left their houses, their goods, and their means of livelihood. They were strangers in a strange land, among a people of different language and customs.”
In the spring of 1975, I cut from the herd, arriving for the first day of my new life on Easter Sunday. I went to sea on a 37 foot sailboat I named Bold Venture. While at sea several miracles occurred. After two years at sea, strictly on my own, with God’s help, I survived knowing who I was and what I was about. When everything should have gone wrong for me, according to authority, everything went right, and has continued to go right. Believe it or not, there is great power in you. Follow the dictates of your conscience.
Under “The Pilgrim Fathers,” I read: “It was their desire for liberty of conscience that inspired the Pilgrims to brave the perils of the long journey across the sea, to endure the hardships and dangers of the wilderness, and with God’s blessing to lay, on the shores of America, the foundation of a mighty nation.”
“Eleven years after the planting of the first colony, Roger Williams came to the New World. Like the early Pilgrims, he came to enjoy religious freedom; but, unlike them, he saw what so few in his time had yet seen—that this freedom was the inalienable right of all, whatever might be their creed. . . Williams was the first person in modern Christendom to establish civil government on the doctrine of the liberty of conscience.” Wouldn’t you know civil authority would not allow this? Civil authority maintained that such a liberty “would subvert the fundamental state and government of the country. He was sentenced to banishment from the colonies, and, finally, to avoid arrest, he was forced to flee, amid the cold and storms of winter, into the unbroken forest.”
Roger Williams found refuge with an Indian tribe “whose confidence and affection he had won while endeavoring to teach them the truths of the gospel. Making his way, at last, after months of change and wandering, to the shores of Narragansett Bay, he there laid the foundation of the first state of modern times that in the fullest sense recognized the right of religious freedom. The fundamental principles of Roger Williams’ colony was ‘that every man should have liberty to worship God according to the light of his own conscience. His little state, Rhode Island, became the asylum of the oppressed, and it increased the prospered until its foundation principle—civil and religious liberty—became the cornerstones of the American Republic.”
In the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable right; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and in the U.S. Constitution, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” here we go again with authority’s unquestionable misbegotten control. On the phony legal ground that Roger Williams’ theory would “subvert the fundamental state and government of the country,” we, the people, are forbidden from acknowledging in schools and other public places our trust in God as the maker and keeper of the law. American children are being misinformed on the historical background of the Constitution being based on “Higher Law.” What began as enjoining what God had not forbidden has once again ended by forbidding what God had explicitly enjoined. What comes around goes around. Wake up, America! You are about to be enslaved.
Comments