The Declaration of Independence announced to the world the fact of the United States of America. It was inspiration from heaven that Thomas Jefferson poured the sentiment of the content into this mounental act of independence.
“When in the course of human Events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with another, and to assume the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nataure’s God entitle them, a decent Respect to the Opinions of Mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the Separation.”
No other document in the world announcing the independence and individuality of a nation expresses so explicitly in a Christian manner the reasons for it existence as our Declaration of Independence.
For 150 years the Founding Fathers had been practicing self-government. They firmly believed that the principle of self-government is predicated upon the Rights of Man, and they unequivocally declared these to be Christian rights:
“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, and they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among are these are Life, and the Pursuit of Happiness -That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men …”
Found in hese words is the embodiment of the Christian basis of government; the depth of their meaning was expressed in 1890 by Richard Frothingham in The Rise of the Republic:
“This is the American theory, expressed ‘in words the memory of which can never die.’ it includes far more than it expresses; for by recognizing human equality and brotherhood, and the individual as the unit of society, it accepts the Christian idea of man as the basis of political institutions; and by proclaiming the right to alter them to meet the progress of society, it provided for the results of a tendency to look, not to the past, but to the future, for types of perfection that was brought into the world by Christianity. To maintain such a theory were fought the battles of the revolution. To build on it a worthly superstructure of government and law, was the work entered upon by heroes and sages, and bequeathed to posterity.)”
