Our forefathers colonized a vast wilderness, established representative governments and obtained independence from England, creating constitutions by which we are governed. We have seen expansive growth, and unprecedented prosperity, in the 400 years since they first came to these shores.

But it is a mistake to equate political history, or apparent prosperity, with true freedom. At root, true freedom cannot exist for the individual without a moral and spiritual foundation within the heart of man. That was Jesus’ teaching almost 2,000 years ago: If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed! And by implication, unless he does this for you, you never will be free, no matter where you live.

In seeking to understand this, we might first survey the various epidemic problems of our day — drug addiction, alcoholism, obesity, credit card debt, educational failure and the like. Each of these involves the use of liberty on the part of individuals. Each of these also represents the failure of individuals to use liberty in a responsible or healthy fashion.

The result is that the individual involved is brought into some form of bondage by his own actions — with life, liberty and property being destroyed. Notice that the moral and spiritual dimension of liberty is the first to fall, and afterwards go the outward trappings.

Thus, political liberty and its maintenance is predicated upon individual morality and virtue — the one cannot exist without the other.

Robert C. Winthrop observed in 1852: “All societies of men must be governed in some way or other. The less they may have of stringent state government, the more they must have of individual self-government.

“The less they rely on public law or physical force, the more they must rely on private moral restraint. Men in a word must necessarily be controlled, either by a powerwithin them or a power without them, either by the word of God or by the strong arm of man; either by the Bible or by the bayonet.”

Noah Webster, whose name has been made famous by his dictionary, noted in 1832: “It is extremely important to our nation, in a political as well as religious view, that all possible authority and influence should be given to the Scriptures; for these furnish the best principles of civil liberty, and the most effectual support of republican government.

“They teach the true principles of that equality of rights which belongs to every one of the human family, but only in consistency with a strict subordination to the magistrate and the law .... The principles of all genuine liberty, and of wise lawsand administrations, are to be drawn from the Bible and sustained by its authority. The man therefore who weakens or destroys the Divine authority of that book may be accessory to all the public disorders which society is doomed to suffer.”

These quotes are representative of the view of our Constitutional Framers. Noah Webster was an active and influential advocate in the call for aConstitutional Convention. Robert C.. Winthrop was speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives in the mid-19th century.

Neither they nor the Framers were advocating by such words a forcing of religion on anyone. But they knew history to demonstrate that free institutions require free men to maintain them. When men lack liberty internally, then they are incapable of either understanding or maintaining a free political system.

James Madison, our fourth president and the man who is considered the Father of the Constitution, brought these points together: “We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind for self- government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.”

It has been a great error to conceive of education as a substitute for the internal liberty that comes from God. As S.W. Foljambe warned in 1876, “Knowledge is power, but it may be power for evil as much as good; it has no moral quality in itself. The greatest danger of the Republic is its educated, cultivated, corrupt demagogues.

“Intelligence without religion is a dangerous pilot for the ship of state. Eliminate that element; take religious thought, sentiment and aspiration from the atmosphere of our education, and men will soon become animalized, and this government sink beneath the green pool of its own corruption.”

Man can inherit free institutions and live with the possibility of external liberty without ever finding it himself. If bondage to the sin that lies within him governs his actions and thinking, he is no better off for the external trappings.