"Love to God and love to man is the substance of religion. When these prevail, civil laws will have little to do."
-- John Witherspoon, Signer of the Declaration of Independence
From Harlan Brown:
I recently finshed reading chapters 2 ("It's Always the Economy") and 3 ("That Which Is Legal Might Also Be Evil") of "When a Nation Forgets God: 7 Lessons from Nazi Germany" by Erwin Lutzer. Page 58 of Chapter 3 says: "Laws reflect a nation's priorities, agenda, and values. In Nazi Germany, where religion was privitized and God was separated from government, not even natural law was recognized as having validity. When Hitler got the Reichstag to give him the power to make the laws, the laws he made were arbitrary, drafted to fulfill the goals of a totalitarian state. The Nazis proclaimed, 'Hitler is the law!' As Goering put it, 'The law and the will of the Fuehrer are one.' Right and wrong were determined by Hitler and his cronies."
Page 61 says: "Without a belief in God, nothing is unconditionally wrong. When God is separated from government we are forced to accept arbitrary laws. Either God is the lawgiver or man is; either we derive our laws from theistic universal values, or we say that the individual countries or cultures are the lawgivers. Either God is supreme the state is supreme."
Lutzer concludes on Page 74: "We must not permit the lawmakers or the courts of America to discourage us from doing what we must: representing Christ in our personal and corporate witness. As our freedoms are curtailed, our witness becomes more focused, more challenging. Let us be obedient to a higher law, the law given by the Supreme Court of the Universe."
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
-- The First Amendment, the United States Constitution
"There is no good government but what is republican...a republic is 'an empire of laws, and not of men'...a republic is the best of governments, so that particular arrangement of the powers of society, or in other words, that form of government which is best contrived to secure an impartial and exact execution of the law, is the best of republics."
-- John Adams, Thoughts on Government, 1776
"A people who have abandoned their allegiance to God, to self-evident truth, to the principles that make the rule of law, and even civilization itself, possible, are ripe for exactly the same sort of destruction that occurred in the last century in Germany and Russia. Go ahead, burn up your most precious inheritance on the altar of perceived political expediency. Just don't whine when you're destroyed. And don't expect those of us who are determined to maintain the old allegiances to like it, or to thank you."
-- Tom Hoefling, April 17, 2012
"This natural law, being as old as mankind and dictated by God himself, is of course superior in obligation to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times: no human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their force, and all their authority, from this original.”
-- William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Law of England (1765)
"'Just and true liberty, equal and impartial liberty,' in matters spiritual and temporal, is a thing that all men are clearly entitled to by the eternal and immutable laws of God and nature, as well as by the law of nations and all well-grounded municipal laws, which must have their foundation in the former."
-- Samuel Adams, The Report of the Committee of Correspondence to the Boston Town Meeting, Nov. 20, 1772
"The instruments, by which [government] must act, are either the authority of the Laws or force. If the first be destroyed, the last must be substituted; ... and where this becomes the ordinary instrument of government, there is an end to liberty."
--Alexander Hamilton
"[W]here there is no law, there is no liberty; and nothing deserves the name of law but that which is certain and universal in its operation upon all the members of the community."
-- Benjamin Rush, letter to David Ramsay, 1788
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