Phil Brennan
Wednesday, July 4, 2001

Thomas Jefferson may have written those words, but the voice that spoke them first spoke in Latin, Greek, French, German, English and earlier, in Aramaic and Hebrew.

When Jefferson wrote of culture as a softening agent, the culture of which he spoke was what we call Western Christian civilization – the culture that produced the men who gave us two of the greatest civil documents ever contrived by man, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States – documents that recognized the inherent dignity of every human and demanded that this dignity be respected and protected by iron-bound laws and respect for the traditions from which they spring.

"[Algernon Sidney wrote in Discourses Concerning Government, Sect. II, Par. 8:] 'Those who have no sense of right, reason or religion, have a natural propensity to make use of their strength to the destruction of such as are weaker than they.' " – Thomas Jefferson: copied into his Commonplace Book.

These were not concepts that sprung from the fertile minds of the men who created them; they were the ideas fermented in the vineyards of the mind and spirit tended by such men as Homer, Cato, Cicero, Pope Gregory the Great, Don Juan of Austria, King Edward the Confessor, St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas Aquinus. They were the product of hundreds of years of Western Christian civilization.

The United States stands on the shoulders of the history of that civilization, yet today that history is scorned in academia and berated in the public square by barbarians who refuse to acknowledge their debt to those who preceded them.

Blinded by the passions and fashions of the moment, this assemblage of latter-day Attilas and Ghengis Khans refuse to recognize that the incredible advances in every imaginable field of human endeavour are the products of the work of centuries of mental effort and ingenuity.

Men such as Jefferson, Washington, John Adams, James Madison – all schooled in the traditions of the civilization out of which they came – are vilified, their characters besmirched, and the precepts by which they governed themselves and their passions treated with derision.

They are branded "slaveholders," aristocrats with little or no regard for the sainted common man. Their flaws are exaggerated and their heroic accomplishments minimized, if recognized at all. They are branded as misguided at best and criminals at worst. They are giants assailed by moral pygmies the likes of which they would have looked upon as the suppurating pustules on the body politic they are.

Did they have flaws? Of course they did – just like me and just like you. They were imperfect men who managed to rise to a level of selfless perfection that enabled them to fashion something new and something sublimely great out of the lessons of a history flawed as they were flawed – the history of Western Christian civilization.

"The human character, we believe, requires in general constant and immediate control to prevent its being biased from right by the seductions of self-love." – Thomas Jefferson to Pierre Samuel Dupont de Nemours, 1816. ME 14:489

Even when they rejected formalized Christianity, as some such as Jefferson did, the morality they embraced was right out of the pages of Holy Scripture – the morality of their Judaic-Christian heritage. They knew sin when they saw it, even though they may have called it by other names.

"The nation who [has] never admitted a chapter of morality into her political code, ... [will] boldly [avow] that whatever power [she] can make hers is hers of right." – Thomas Jefferson to John Langdon, 1810. (*) ME 12:375

Unlike the barbarians who sup at a table laden with the intellectual and material victuals that are their enduring legacy, they would never have questioned either the tenets of Judaic-Christian morality or the lessons of history that demonstrate the folly of violating those tenets.

Can you imagine John Adams, that most devoted of husbands and fathers, tolerating the assaults against the family so prevalent today? Or James Madison or Thomas Jefferson standing idly by while the Constitution of the United States is shredded, bit by bit, by legalistic morons and uncaring federal and state legislators who find their Marxist schemes thwarted by the Constitution?

They fashioned that document with full knowledge and awareness of the flawed nature of mankind and the need to guard against the excesses that flawed nature can create when men seek to govern.

"Either force or corruption has been the principle of every modern government." – Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1796.

"Force cannot change right." – Thomas Jefferson to John Cartwright, 1824. ME 16:43

Their fears of government, which Washington rightly saw as "force," were not figments of their imaginations – they lived under tyranny and revolted against it. And having won their liberty, they set out to fashion a government that would be restrained from the urge to tyranny that is inherent in the very nature of government &30150 a government of laws and not of men.

In fashioning that new form of government they drew on the history of the civilization from which they sprang. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States would never have existed had they not have had the experience of Western Christian civilization to draw on.

But these men, these Founding Fathers, were not alone. The people of the colonies who became the first citizens of the United States were also products of the same civilization and the strictures and traditions of that civilization. Had they not been, the work of the Founders would have been in vain.

But because the farmers and merchants and manufacturers of plows and tools and furniture and the other rudiments of colonial life also sprang from the same historical background, they understood and respected the governmental structure that the Jeffersons and the Madisons and the Adamses and the Washingtons had created.

Despite the claims of the barbarians of academia, this government was not simply the work of a group of wealthy, slave-holding aristocrats, but instead was the corporate accomplishment of the governors and the governed who gave their consent.

"There is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents. ... There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents; for with these it would belong to the first class. ... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency." – Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1813. ME 13:396

On this Fourth of July, when every aspect of Western Christian civilization is under attack, let us recognize that should we allow the barbarians to conquer and all aspects of Western Christian civilization upon which it is based to be eradicated, the United States of America, out of which it emerged, will vanish as well.

We will sink into an abyss of savagery and chaos, and mankind's greatest achievement in self-government will be gone into the trash bin of history.

Happy Fourth of July.

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He also served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee, which won statehood for Alaska. E-mail: pvb@pvbr.com

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