Is there a Guardian Angel hereabouts?

Sometimes we are blessed and don’t understand why.

It happened to me last week. I needed to put out a new bale of hay for my two “assisted living” horses but was putting off doing so because I have to rely on my son, Mike, and his bale moving rig.

I didn’t want to bother him because he recently underwent shoulder surgery and I didn’t want him to take the risk of injuring that shoulder.

Last Monday as I was thinking of turning the horses into the area where my spare bales are kept, I saw something I didn’t expect – a brand new bale in the round bale feeder and the two old horses happily digging in. My three spare bales were still in place, so I didn’t think Mike had done it. However I texted him just to make sure.

“No, not me,” he said, then added “that sure was nice of someone.”

I checked around with a few other possible donors and got the same message.

Then I decided that someone had placed a bale in my lot by mistake or I had a guardian angel.

That guardian angel bit doesn’t seem out of the realm of possibility to me considering all the times I could easily have been snuffed out before now if someone or something had not been looking after me.

But I’m really thinking it was put there by accident by someone getting wrong directions about where to deliver a bale.

If the owner of that bale of hay will notify me, I’ll happily pay him and thank him, too.

••• In the Wednesday edition I used the first part of a column written by Glenn Ellmers, Salvatori Research Fellow in the American Founding at the Claremont Institute, which became part of a speech given at Hillsboro College in Michigan that also became a column in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsboro College.

It should be mentioned that Hillsboro College emphasizes Christianity and morality and takes not one red cent of government money in order to maintain its independence.

Ellmers’ thoughts include the possibility that the United States is in danger of losing the precious gift of freedom of religion.

Considering the stuff that came out of Washington the last few years during an anti-Christianity bias reign of President Joe Biden, which many considered the third term of Barack Obama, that concern seems possible.

President Donald Trump has changed the picture in Washington with his crusade to put down the Deep State’s anti-Christianity bias.

Ellmer’s thoughts covering the path Christianity took over 2,000 years to become a dominant religion in the West, especially the United States, made a lot of sense so I’m using a small portion of the rest his work, due to space limitations.

He discussed ancient religions – nearly every regime had one and they were political as well, the opposition to Christianity by the government in Rome, until it became that government’s official religion throughout the known world, the changes regarding authority, the growth in belief of God-given rights as opposed to the belief by ancient kings that they had divine rule, through the reformation through the establishment of the United States republic.

Ellmer concluded his thoughts this way: Even before the Reformation, which ushered in centuries of conflict between Catholics and Protestants, the problem of doctrine manifested itself in terms of heresy. The church spent centuries hammering out the precise content of the catechism. Gnosticism, Arianism, Pelagianism, and many other heresies were investigated, declared to be errors, and stamped out.

Three dilemmas emerged because Christianity was the first non-political religion in the West. Being a Christian was not a question of what political community you belonged to, it was a matter of faith or belief. While that was incredibly liberating—because it meant salvation was open to every human being—it created unprecedented challenges for politics and citizenship.

Founders Solved Complicated Problems

In order to establish republican self-government, the American Founders had to solve … complicated problems. That meant figuring out how to create moral and political legitimacy for the new nation. It also meant establishing the sacredness of the law—which alone can command the citizens’ devotion and obedience—while avoiding the religious conflict and persecution that had plagued Europe.

The solution they came up with is famously stated in the Declaration of Independence: “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This revolutionary truth, combining human reason and divine revelation, provided the basis for establishing religious liberty for the first time in human history.

By looking to the laws of nature (or laws of reason) and nature’s God as the ultimate justification for their revolution, the Founders were asserting that there was an objective moral order in the world because that world was created by a benevolent and reasonable God. Since our minds are a gift from God, and He intended us to rely on our own rational faculties.

We can’t know through reason alone those things that only come directly from revelation, including five of the Ten Commandments. Aristotle, who lived hundreds of years before Christ, could not know about keeping the Sabbath holy. But he could know that one should honor one’s parents and that theft and murder are wrong. That is why Aristotle’s teaching in his Nicomachean Ethics is almost perfectly compatible with the morality proclaimed in the Bible.

This natural moral order exists outside of our will—it exists whether we like it or not. We are born into both a physical and a moral world that we do not create. Today’s Leftists think they can alter human nature—for example, by allowing children to choose “gender reassignment surgery”— but this will never work and will never lead to true happiness because we cannot change our nature. By contrast, the laws of nature and nature’s God are fixed and unchanging. They serve as the ground for political authority and supply conventional or everyday law with sacred and transcendent authority. In establishing this foundation for American politics, the Founders addressed the three problems mentioned above.

First, they solved the split between piety and citizenship by supplying a common ground for morality. Since we can understand virtue and vice through our own rational faculties, the law can enforce moral precepts that are acknowledged by both political and ecclesiastical authorities. In other words, because the morality of the Bible and the morality of reason are compatible, one can be both a pious believer and a good citizen, while avoiding the contentious sectarian disputes that tore Europe apart.

Second, this common ground of morality makes it possible to delineate in a clear way the political and religious realms. That the separation of church and state becomes possible for the first time can be seen most clearly in Jefferson’s Virginia Bill for Religious Freedom. The Declaration’s teaching about the laws of nature and nature’s God establishes a kind of political theology, a non-sectarian ground of legitimacy that makes the laws “sacred” without getting the government involved in theological disputes about the Trinity, faith versus works, etc. According to many Protestant ministers of the Founding era, this also allowed true Christianity to flourish for the first time because Christianity could be practiced by choice rather than by coercion.

Third, the Founders solved the problem of religious persecution. Because the government and the churches can agree on a moral code that is compatible with both reason and revelation, each can operate in its proper realm without intruding on the other. It becomes possible to institutionalize religious liberty by prohibiting religious tests for office and keeping government out of the business of punishing heresy.

The American Founders’ invocation of the transcendent moral authority of nature is one of the most remarkable acts of statesmanship in human history. The question which we and all American patriots confront today is whether we still understand and appreciate this incredible gift of religious liberty bequeathed to us by the Founders. Do we still have the knowledge and courage to keep alive the sacred fire of liberty?

Because of space limitations, I cut out a part of Ellmer’s remarks, which Biblical students will find interesting.

Anyone wanting to read the entire speech can use their computer search engine to find it by typing in “Imprimis.' It should pop right up.

It will be the first column on that site. Simply click on it.