Voices from the past

I am currently reading the first book in a series called The Light and The Glory in which the authors wish to show the role that God played in the foundation of our great nation. I came across two passages that I think are quite profound to our day and age. The first is a hypothetical conversation between Thomas Hooker, a puritan minister and John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in which they are contemplating the merits of various forms of government. Winthrop says,"But I say, you cannot trust most men to have the necessary wisdom to elect governors and assistants and magistrates. You'll have them putting their cronies in office for favors or putting in golden-tongued charmers who will promise the world and deliver nothing." It seems that if Winthrop had uttered these words they certainly would apply to the current age. When we rely on people that are making decisions with information that is flawed, that is the risk we run. The duty of every voter should be to objectively examine the motivations and intentions of every candidate before they are voted into office. The second passage is from the writings of Thomas Hooker. "In all combinations there is and will be some common end...but if each man may do what is good in his own eyes, proceed according to his own pleasure, so that none may cross him or control him by any power, there must of necessity follow the distraction and desolation of the whole, when each man hath liberty to follow his own imagination and humorous devices, and seek his particular, but oppose one another and all prejudice the public good...therefore, mutual subjection is, as it were, the sinews of society, by which it is sustained and supported." Hooker's words speak to a population that is not bound by any moral obligation and is instead looking more to the individual pleasures, a state that sadly seems to be coming to pass. The way out is subjection to the will of God.