From Bondage to Spiritual Faith

Commentary by Jim day

Allegedly, about the time our original thirteen states adopted our Constitution in 1787, Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, was supposed have had made the following statement about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier. A search of the internet however refutes this attribution but instead claims that no one actually knows who coined this observation. Regardless of its origin, history has proven it to be an accurate assessment of the plight of a democracy which is one of the reasons I cringe whenever I hear the word used in reference to our Republic. As any student of unrevised history may recall, our Founding Fathers fought vehemently NOT to establish our nation as a democracy because they knew full well that a democracy was nothing more than mob rule.

Here is Alexander Tyler’s (or whoever’s) observation:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, those nations always progressed through the following sequence: 1. From bondage to spiritual faith; 2. From spiritual faith to great courage; 3. From courage to liberty; 4. From liberty to abundance; 5. From abundance to complacency; 6. From complacency to apathy; 7. From apathy to dependence; 8. From dependence back into bondage."

If I were a gambling man I would place my chips as to where America is today on number 7 and heading rapidly toward number 8.

We need to get back to number 1...and do so quickly.