A PILGRIM SPEAKS TO MODERN AMERICA

Four hundred five winters have passed since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, 404 winters since they hosted the Wampanoag at that memorable Thanksgiving feast. As they drafted the Mayflower Compact that laid the foundation for the colonies, the states, and the nation that would follow them, they bequeathed a heritage that we should be proud of.

But would the Pilgrims be proud of us? If William Bradford, their Governor and historian, could speak to us today, he might say something like this:

“We left you a land of liberty, secured by the Mayflower Compact through which we authorized our descendants to make such ‘just and equal Laws, ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient.’

“One hundred fifty-six years later you declared independence from Great Britain. We in our day weren’t ready to go that far; we acknowledged ourselves ‘loyal subjects of our dread sovereign Lord King James.’ But we respect your grievances, because we ourselves were persecuted for our faith. When King James I said of us, ‘I will make them conform, or I willy harry them out of the land,’ we might have practiced interposition had we the power. But we did not, so we came to America. Your Declaration of Independence is based on ‘the laws of nature and of nature’s God,” recognizes that we are created in a state of equality and endowed by our Creator with God-given rights, and that governments are instituted among men by the ‘consent of the governed.’

“Eleven years later you adopted the best written Constitution the world has ever seen, carefully limiting the powers of government and separating them into legislative, executive, and judicial branches and protecting the basic rights of mankind. And as the delegates filed out of Independence Hall September 17, 1787, a woman asked Ben Franklin, “What sort of government have you given us – a republic or an empire?’ Franklin answered, ‘A republic; if you can keep it.’

“And have you kept your republic? In some ways you’ve done very well. Your Declaration of Independence and Constitution have served as models for nations across the world. Because of your Puritan work ethic and your free enterprise system, you have achieved prosperity beyond measure. You’ve made great advances in medicine and technology, you have built a strong military that has defeated Nazism and held off Communism and radical Islam. Most importantly, your nation has been the bastion of Christianity for much of your history. You have sent out more Christian missionaries than any other nation in history; the Gideons alone distributed more than one billion Bibles during the 1900s.

“But in many ways, you have gone astray, and you have in the words of President Abraham Lincoln (whose ancestor we knew at Plymouth), you ‘have forgotten God.’ Your children no longer honor Him, because you consigned them to humanistic public education. When not based upon the Word of God, education becomes indoctrination in godlessness, lawlessness, and promiscuity. Your children no longer walk in God’s paths, or even in your paths, because you failed to train them to do so.

You have filled God’s place with another god – government. In flagrant violation of your own Constitution, you have allowed government to grow, year by year, so that your total budget this year is $7.01 trillion. But you have refused to pay for this profligate government; this year you will collect an estimated $5.23 in taxes and revenues, leaving a deficit of$1.78 trillion for your children.

“Besides paying three million federal civilian employees, this colossal budget goes to support the siren of socialism. Socialism was forced upon us by our financiers who naively thought that would maximize their profits. But it didn’t work then, it has never worked, and it won’t work now. We found that men became indolent when their labors brought no profit, and it almost forced us into starvation. Finally, we threw off socialism and embraced free enterprise and private property ownership. As I noted in my History of Plymouth Plantation,

‘This had very good success, for it made all hands very industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been by any means the Governor or any other could use, and saved him a great deal of trouble, and gave far better content. The women now went willingly into the field, and took their little ones with them to set corn; which before would allege weakness and inability; whom to have compelled would have been thought great tyranny and oppression’”

“But you have forgotten the past failures of socialism and have elected a socialist mayor of New York City. I pray you will awaken to the error of this evil, or it will most surely destroy you.

“You have preserved the rights of speech and worship fairly well, and you have established a system of justice that, while far from perfect, is better than any other in the world. But you have denied those rights to children in the womb, and for a while you even pretended abortion was a constitutional right. You no longer believe in “liberty through law;” you have allowed liberty to degenerate into promiscuity and licentiousness. You have distorted liberty into the right to do everything my fellow Pilgrims abhorred as contrary to God’s laws and therefore self-destructive, while you repress the industrious with excessive taxation and regulation.

“Yea, even your churches have forgotten God. In Old Plymouth our preachers proclaimed the God’s Word in sermons that were often two hours in length. Too many of your modern and modernist pastors today no longer believe the Bible is the Word of God, and they preach little sermonettes for Christianettes in their bassinets.

“ In our Pilgrim churches we followed the regulative principle that church music should be based on the Word of God, and to keep our music pure, we sang only from the Psalter. I realize that in Germany Lutherans followed the normative principle that church music should be consistent with the Word of God but not necessarily based on the Word of God. I can appreciate the great hymns of Luther and those of later composers such as Isaac Watts and John Wesley. I can admire that sacred music of Johann Sebastian Bach and Frederic Handel, although we would not have used them in our churches. But your churches have cast aside not only our psalters but all of this vast musical heritage. You have replaced it with unmelodious praise choruses that are based on sensuality rather than on the Bible, that mean nothing, say nothing, and that edify nothing.

“I realize our psalm-singing seems strange to you. But music is an expression of the soul, and our Pilgrim Psalter reflects who we were. Your music is different because you have changed. But have you changed for the better?

“And what of your Thanksgiving feast? You now call it Turkey Day. You have focused on food, family, and football, but again you have forgotten God. This Thanksgiving, I urge you to turn to the plymrock.org website that tells of the Pilgrims and of your Christian heritage. There you can purchase my History of Plymouth Plantation.

“After I wrote this History, it survived for three centuries as a single handwritten manuscript. It survived a fire and a flood. It was stored in the tower of the North Church in Boston, and during your War for Independence the British occupied the church and used it as a livery stable. After the War, the manuscript was gone and presumed lost. In the late 1800s it was discovered in England, and in 1899 it was returned to Plymouth and published for common use.

“God’s preservation of my manuscript was almost as great a miracle as His preservation of the Plymouth colony itself. And if God preserved it, He must have done so for a reason – to enable you to read it, understand it, and profit from it.

“In that History I wrote,

‘Thus out of small beginnings greater things have been produced by His hand that made all things of nothing and gives being to all things that are; and as one small candle may light a thousand, so the light here kindled hath shone unto many, yea in some sort to our whole nation; let the glorious name of Jehovah have all praise.’

“When I wrote ‘our whole nation,’ I was probably thinking of Great Britain. But I think God intended those words for your whole nation, the United States of America. God has blessed America, and I believe He will bless America again – but only if you return to the faith of your fathers.”

Sources:

1 - Mary Huffman, The Pilgrim Psalter (The Psalter Company LLC, Montgomery, AL); also available through plymrock.org

2 - Plymrock.org

3- William Bradford, History of Plymouth Plantation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959), available through plymrock.org

Colonel Eidsmoe serves as Professor of Constitutional Law for the Oak Brook College of Law & Government Policy (obcl.edu), as Senior Counsel for the Foundation for Moral Law (morallaw.org), and as Pastor of Woodland Presbyterian Church (woodlandpca.org) of Notasulga, Alabama. He is also Chairman of the Board of the Plymouth Rock Foundation (plymrock.org). He may be contacted for speaking engagements at eidsmoeja@juno.com.

THE VIEWS OF SUBMITTED EDITORIALS MAY NOT BE THE EXPRESS VIEWS OF THE ALABAMA GAZETTE.