June 30, 2005 – Religion, Politics, and
Thomas Jefferson
Early in his campaign for president, Thomas Jefferson was accused of being an atheist by many prominent clergymen. One of Jefferson’s most vocal early critics was Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale College. On July 4, 1798, Dwight delivered a speech urging the voters to defeat the Jeffersonians—“the illuminati, the philosophers, the atheists, and the deists.” Dwight predicted dire consequences if Jefferson and his party were elected: “We may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, the vessels of the sacramental supper borne by an ass in public procession, and our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in chanting mockeries against God.”1
Rev. William Linn of New York voiced similar concerns over a Jefferson presidency when he proclaimed that “the election of any man avowing the principles of Mr. Jefferson would . . . destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society.” He further warned that “the voice of the nation in calling a deist to the first office must be construed into no less than a rebellion against God.”2 The New England clergy especially vilified Jefferson, “whom they hated for `disbelief in the deluge and his opposition to Bible reading in the schools.’“3 Even the press got into the act. The Federalist Gazette of the United States framed the key question of the election, “to be asked by every American, laying his hand on his heart, as: `Shall I continue in allegiance to God—and a Religious President; Or impiously declare for Jefferson—and No God!!!’”4
1Quoted in Hackler, Jefferson and the Religious Right: New England Clergy Led America’s First Negative Campaign, Tulsa World (September 24, 1994), Opinion Section, 1.
2Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 225.
June 29, 2005 – The Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse
Movies have been made about Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Ray Charles, Dorothy Dandridge, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and Billy Holliday. With the exception of Malcolm X (Little), most African American big-budget movie biographies are about sports figures and entertainers. There are exceptions with smaller scale movies: The Rosa Parks Story (2002), A Woman Called Moses (1978), based on the life of Harriet Tubman, and Something the Lord Made, the story of Vivien Thomas who worked with Dr. Alfred Blalock in developing surgical techniques to correct “Blue-Baby Syndrome” (2004). One of the first biographies I ever read was an old Reader’s Digest story of George Washington Carver: “The Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse.”1 To this day, no one has ever done a full-length bio-pic of this great scientist. His story is extraordinary. He was born in 1864 near Diamond Grove, Missouri, on the farm of an elderly white couple Moses and Susan Carver. While an infant, he and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate night-raiders. Moses set out to locate George and his mother after the war. While he was able to locate George and trade him for a horse, his mother had disappeared forever. Moses and Susan Carver reared George and his brother as their own children.
After enduring resistance in securing an education in a segregated world, Carver was able to enter Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, as the first black student where he studied piano and art since the college did not offer science classes. Because of his interest in a career in science, he later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1891, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897. Carver became a member of the faculty of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics (the first black faculty member for Iowa College).
These historical details alone were inspiring enough to document in a movie, but it was his teaching career at Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes that established Carver as a world-class scientist. Booker T. Washington convinced Carver to come south and serve as the school's Director of Agriculture. Carver remained on the faculty until his death in 1943. Carver gained fame but no fortune in the development of multiple uses for ordinary and everyday foodstuffs like the peanut and sweet potato. His legend as a botanical miracle worker attracted luminaries like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and Thomas Edison. He addressed the U.S. Congress and was made a member of the prestigious Royal Society of London. While he was deeply committed to his scientific work, it was his devotion to Jesus Christ that sets him apart from many in the scientific field. He refutes the often heard canard that creationists cannot do science: “If you go to the first chapter of Genesis, we can interpret very clearly, I think, what God intended when he said, ‘Behold, I have given you every herb that bears seed. To you it shall be as meat.’”
June 28, 2005 – Frankly, I Don’t Give a ______________.”
The American Film Institute (AFI) revealed the top movie lines of all time in its “100 Years...100 Movie Quotes,” a three-hour special television.1 The number-one line was Rhett Butler’s last words to Scarlet O’Hara, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” The acceptability of the line was debated by movie censors. The “damn” supposedly referred to damnation, thus making it an expletive, and according to the movie codes in 1939, expletives were not permitted in movie dialog. While Margaret Mitchell spelled it “damn” in her novel Gone With the Wind, the more accurate spelling might have been “dam.” A “dam” is a small Indian coin, similar in value to our penny. So Rhett was actually saying, “The value of my caring isn’t worth a penny.” “I don’t give a tinker’s dam”2 has a similar meaning, although some disagree as to the phrase’s origin.3 You might remember the song “Greenback Dollar” sung by the Kingston Trio. It included the line, “I don’t give a damn about a greenback dollar, spend it as fast as I can.” The use of “damn” in a song was controversial even in 1963 when the song was first released. It was “played over” on the 45 version4 of the song in order to get radio airplay.5 We’ve come a long way since 1939, hearing on a single “damn” or “dam” in a movie might bring some people back to the theaters in a year when Hollywood is in its biggest slump.
A Methodist dentist, Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, objected to the use of fermented wine in the communion service of his church in Vineland, New Jersey. He experimented in his kitchen to come with a non-alcoholic substitute which he named “Dr. Welch’s Unfermented Wine.” This was in 1869. He approached church officials to persuade them to substitute his beverage for the traditional wine. The elders regarded his suggestion as being an unacceptable innovation. His son Charles, who was also a dentist, changed the name to Welch’s Grape Juice. He promoted the product at the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago. He said that his work on the wine substitute was born “out of a passion to serve God by helping his church to give its communion (as) ‘the fruit of the vine’ instead of the ‘cup of devils.’” He set up a production facility in a barn behind the family home. Since the skins of grapes are covered with yeast, fermentation begins almost immediately after the yeast mixes with the juice. The juice has to be pasteurized to stop the fermentation process. Response was so overwhelming that he gave up dentistry and devoted full time to making and distributing grape juice. Many Christians claim that Jesus drank grape juice—the true fruit of the vine—and not wine. Since grape juice was not developed until the nineteenth century, it’s hardly possible that the wine mentioned in the Bible was actually grape juice. “Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan startles the world by serving Welch's Grape Juice instead of wine at a full-dress diplomatic function honoring the retiring British ambassador. Newspaper columnists, cartoonists and editors make much of it for months.” Today, Welch’s is a multi-million-dollar food company.
A young colonist's education in New England was provided by a very limited curriculum, consisting of three books in addition to the Bible: the Hornbook, the New England Primer, and the Bay Psalm Book. The Hornbook consisted of a single piece of parchment, covered with a transparent substance attached to a paddle-shaped piece of wood. The alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, and religious doctrines were written or printed on the parchment.
In 1690 the first edition of the New England Primer appeared. By 1700 the Primer had replaced the Hornbook in a number of places. The Primer expanded the religious themes by including the names of the Old and New Testament books, the Lord's Prayer, "An Alphabet of Lessons for Youth," the Apostles' Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Westminster Assembly Shorter Catechism, and John Cotton's (1584-1652) "Spiritual Milk for American Babes." The Primer, developed by Benjamin Harris, included an ingenious way to learn the alphabet while mastering basic biblical truths and lessons about life.
A In Adam's Fall,
We sinned all
B Thy Life to mend,
This Book attend
C The Cat doth play,
And after slay
The Primer was later enlarged in 1777. Additional biblical material was added. The rhyming alphabet was updated and made more theological. For example, in the 1777 edition the letter C reads "Christ Crucified, For Sinners Died."
June 23, 2005 – When Christ Was King at King
An advertisement appeared in the New York Mercury on June 3, 1754, announcing the opening of King's College (today known as Columbia University). Similar to the requirements demanded by Harvard and Yale, King's College required a knowledge of Latin and Greek. Although the college was affiliated with the Anglican Church, the advertisement assured students and parents that "there is no intention to impose on the scholars the peculiar tenets of any particular sect of Christians, but to inculcate upon their tender minds the great principles of Christianity and morality in which true Christians of each denomination are generally agreed." The advertisement went on to state:
The chief thing that is aimed at in this college is to teach and engage the children to know God in Jesus Christ and to love and serve Him in all sobriety, godliness, and righteousness of life, with perfect heart and a willing mind, and to train them up in all virtuous habits and all such useful knowledge as may render them creditable to their families and friends, ornaments to their country, and useful to the public weal in their generations.
The original shield of King's College was adopted in 1755 and carries a symbolic image of the importance of the Bible in learning. Over the head of the seated woman is the (Hebrew) Tetragrammaton, YHVH (Jehovah); the Latin motto around her head means "In Thy light we see light" (Psalm 36:10); the Hebrew phrase on the ribbon is Uri El ("God is my light"), an allusion to Psalm 27:1; and at the feet of the woman is the New Testament passage commanding Christians to desire the pure milk of God's word (1 Peter 2:1–2).
June 22, 2005 – Mr. McGuffey and His Readers
The most widely used textbook series used in public schools from 1836 to 1920 were William Holmes McGuffey's Eclectic Readers. More than 120 million Readers were sold during this period. The Readers stressed religion and its relationship to morality and the proper use of knowledge. In an introduction for a reissue of the Fifth Reader, historian Henry Steele Commager writes:
What was the nature of the morality that permeated the Readers? It was deeply religious, and . . . religion then meant a Protestant Christianity. . . . The world of the McGuffeys was a world where no one questioned the truths of the Bible or their relevance to everyday contact. . . . The Readers, therefore, are filled with stories from the Bible, and tributes to its truth and beauty.1
Competing textbooks of the same era contained varying amounts of biblical material, but McGuffey contained the greatest amount—“more than three times as much as any other text of the period.”2 Subsequent editions of the Readers—1857 and 1879—led to a reduction in the amount of material that came from the Bible. Even so, the 1879 edition contained the Sermon on the Mount, two selections from the Book of Psalms, the Lord's Prayer, the story of the death of Absalom (2 Sam. 18), and Paul’s speech on the Areopagus (Acts 17). The Bible was still referred to as “‘the Book of God,’ ‘a source of inspiration,’ ‘an important basis for life,’ and was cited in support of particular moral issues.”3
1 Henry Steele Commager, Preface, McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader. Quoted in John W. Whitehead, The Rights of Religious Persons in Public Education, rev. ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1994), 42.
2 John H. Westerhoff, III, “The Struggle for a Common Culture: Biblical Images in Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks,” The Bible in American Education, eds. David L. Barr and Nicholas Piediscalzi (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 32.
3 Westerhoff, “The Struggle for a Common Culture: Biblical Images in Nineteenth-Century Schoolbooks,” 28.
June 21, 2005 – Oswald the “Unlucky” Rabbit
In the 1920s, Walt Disney began a new career as a cartoonist. A rarity in those days since the industry was almost nonexistent. Most cartooning was done in small newspaper strips. Animation, drawing individual cells of incremental movement, had been done with small picture books. The forerunners to film animation were the thaumatrope (turning marvel), phenakistoscope (spindle viewer), zoetrope (wheel of life), and praxinoscope (action viewer) that let you view a spinning card with small images on it, each image like a single cell in an animated movie. The two art forms were put together once film production became possible and profitable. Animation was a labor intensive business. Disney hired additional artists to draw the thousands of still pictures (cells) needed to produce a high quality animated feature. Disney's early success was with an animated character named “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.” The copyright, however, was held by a movie distributor. The distributor, hoping to cut costs, hired the cartoonists outright, eliminating the need to pay Disney. Based on physical assets and general abilities, Disney was not needed. Or was he? When was the last time you saw an Oswald Rabbit cartoon? Where did the distributor go wrong?
“The distributor, with the Disney staff and the copyright on Disney's character, expected to profit from his coup—but without Disney's ideas and fantasies. The physical things—the drawings, the film, and the theaters—were merely vehicles. It was only a matter of time before another set of vehicles could be arranged and the ideas incorporated in a new character—Mickey Mouse—which Disney copyrighted in his own name.”1
Disney's creative genius made the difference. Of course, Disney also needed the cartoonists (who were better artists than he was), the theaters, and the distribution vehicles. But it was Disney's vision and ideas that made his creations household names around the world. Mickey Mouse debuted in “Steamboat Willie” at the Colony Theatre in New York City on November 18, 1928. The rest is history.
1Thomas Sowell, Knowledge and Decisions (New York: Basic Books, 1980), 71.
June 20, 2005 – The Apple Tree That Ate Roger Williams
Roger Williams (1603–1683), founder of the Rhode Island colony, believed that the Church of England had not gone far enough in reforming itself. To the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, Williams's preaching sounded a lot like what European Anabaptists had preached in the sixteenth century—separation and purity no matter what the cost. As a result, the fragile colony of Massachusetts feared that an uprising similar to the one in the German city-state of Münster in 1534 could take place in New England if Williams’s views spread among more radical groups.
The General Court ordered Williams to leave the colony within six weeks and return to England. Because it was winter, he was allowed to remain in the colony until spring. Before the authorities could send him packing back to England, Williams left the jurisdiction of Massachusetts Bay with twenty supporters. They headed for Narragansett Bay, forty miles south of the Massachusetts colony. There Williams established a settlement, naming it Providence Plantation “in a sense of God's merciful providence unto me in my distress.”
Upon his death, Williams was buried on the family farm where apple trees were growing. Many years later, the Rhode Island Historical Society decided to exhume his body for a more honoring burial. When the grave was opened, Williams was gone. It seems that a “root of an apple tree had penetrated the head of the coffin and had followed down Williams’ spine, dividing into a fork at the legs. The tree had absorbed the chemicals of the decaying body and had transmuted them into its wood and fruit. The apples, in turn, had been eaten by people, quite unconscious of the fact that they were indirectly taking into their systems part of the long-dead Williams.”1
1 Merrill C. Tenney, The Reality of the Resurrection (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1963), 170.
June 17, 2005 – Power From Within
On May 28th, 1849, Robert C. Winthrop (1809–1894), descendant of Governor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, addressed the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Bible Society in Boston with these words:
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 power within them, or by 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. It may do for other countries and other governments to talk about the State supporting religion. Here, under our own free institutions, it is Religion which must support the State.1
Those who are for separating religion from society, in particular politics, are the same ones who appeal to civil government to enact more laws and increase taxes to solve problems that are best handled by changing individuals through transformed lives that can only occur through the proclamation of the gospel.
1 Cited in Verna M. Hall, ed., The Christian History of the American Revolution (San Francisco, CA: Foundation for American Christian Eduction, 1976), 20.
June 16, 2005 – There Really Was a Boy Named Sue
Johnny Cash had a large repertoire of songs—everything from “Matthew 24 is Knocking at the Door” to “Burning Ring of Fire.” The one song that brings the most laughter to the listener is “A Boy Named Sue.”1 The lyrics are those of the multi-talented Shel Silverstein (1930–1999),2 author of The Giving Tree, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Falling Up, and other award-winning children’s books. In addition to books, Silverstein wrote dozens of clever songs. You might remember “The Unicorn” by the Irish Rovers and “Cover of the Rollin’ Stone” by Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show. But it was Cash who made “A Boy Named Sue” memorable when he recorded it on February 24, 1969 at San Quentin Prison before a live but incarcerated audience. Cash hadn’t had the chance to learn the lyrics before he began to belt it out to his demanding audience. He was reading the words as he sang it. If you listen closely, you can hear the shouts of approval from the appreciative crowd of convicts, many of whom could tell stories of their own about abandonment and abuse. Cash commented that it was the most cleverly written song that he had ever heard. The song is about a boy who grows up angry at his father, not only for leaving his family but for naming him Sue. After the boy grows up, he sees his father in a bar and gets in a fight with him because his father gave him a girl’s name. When his father explains that he named him Sue to make sure he would grow up tough, the son embraces his father but still detests his name.
Now to the title of this article. There really was a boy named Sue. Sue Hicks, the City Attorney of Dayton, Tennessee,3 was the person who arrested John Scopes in the famous Scopes “Monkey Trial” of 1925 that pitted the state of Tennessee against the ACLU and the teaching of evolution in public schools. Maybe Shel (Sheldon) Silverstein got the inspiration for “ A Boy Named Sue” from his own life. His parents called him “Shelly.”
1 “A Boy Named Sue” lyrics: www.banned-width.com/shel/works/boysue.html
June 15, 2005 – Deism, Unitarianism, and the Founding Fathers
The belief in a Creator-God who is not personal and does not react with his creation was quite fashionable around the time of the War for Independence—but not nearly so fashionable as we have been told. Many historians claim that the Founding Fathers were not Christians, but Deists. Deists believed in a “God” who created all things but does not intervene in the workings of His creation. Most of the Founding Fathers who are said to have been Deists were really what would later be called Unitarians. Unitarians, like Christians, believed in a “God” who both created all things and rules all things by His divine providence. Like Deists, however, Unitarians denied the Trinity: denied that Jesus is God, the second person of the Trinity, and denied that the Holy Spirit is God, the third person of the Trinity.
It is true that Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and George Washington did dabble in Deism to varying degrees. Franklin and Jefferson were what would later be called Unitarians, and John Adams later became a Unitarian. (Jefferson, of course, had no part in the framing or ratification of the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.) But most of these men thought and acted fairly consistently within a Christian worldview. Their view of man’s sinfulness and of the proper God-ordained role of government generally followed the Bible.
Moreover, as historian M.E. Bradford discovered (to his surprise), very few of the statesmen who gave us our independence, the Articles of Confederation, and Constitution were Deists or Unitarians. At least fifty-one, and probably fifty-three of the framers of the Constitution, and a similar proportion of the leaders of the state ratification conventions, were Christians, not Deists or Unitarians.
June 14, 2005 – Political and Religious Mudslinging: Nothing New Under the Sun
In the election of 1800, as the Federalists grew more desperate in their battles with the Republicans, they began to sling “mud” at their opponent Thomas Jefferson. Federalist authors attacked Jefferson’s abandonment of Christianity and were answered by Republican authors claiming that he was a Christian. (Jefferson was actually what would later be termed a Unitarian, someone who did not believe in the Triune nature of God.) Jefferson occasionally attended church services, but he was not a member of any Christian church. He did not take the presidential oath of office with his hand on the Bible (the only president not to do so). He also refused to proclaim any national days of prayer and thanksgiving. Federalist propagandists saw Jefferson’s unbelief as ushering in an American version of the French Revolution. They warned that if this “howling atheist” were elected, it would prove that God had utterly forsaken the United States, whose people could then expect God’s just vengeance in the form of “dwellings in flames, hoary hairs bathed in blood, female chastity violated ... children writhing on the pike and halberd.” For the most part, Jefferson kept his religious views private. Even his cut-and-paste life of Christ—The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth—remained unpublished in his lifetime.
June 13, 2005 – Jesus Out West
When we read about religion in America, most of the attention is placed on the earliest period of settlement—beginning with Jamestown in 1607—and limited to the original 13 colonies. While credit for the settlement of the West “has been given to trappers, explorers, miners, the military, homesteaders and even gunslingers,” history textbooks are nearly silent on the role religion played. Christian History magazine states, “Though history has all but forgotten them, it was Christian preachers and teachers who really tamed the West.” The language used to describe western expansion carried with it religious descriptions such as the “promised land” or “Eden before the fall.” Discovery of gold in California was viewed as a “sign of divine favor.” All of this helps to put journalist Louis O’Sullivan’s words in perspective: “The American claim is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent, which Providence has given us.” Christianity was not the only religion to make its way west. Of course, there was an indigenous native religion. Led by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had settlements in the western frontier before Protestants settled in New England. Historian Ferenc Morton Szasz of the University of New Mexico writes: “The west had no institutions per se—the churches provided the institutions: the hospitals, schools, orphanages, old-age homes and colleges. The state would eventually take them over but at the start, it was the churches. The railroads donated land to the churches because churches meant stability.” Sam Houston’s wife Margaret led him to Christ in 1854. When a friend asked if the baptism he received at Rocky Creek had washed his sins away, Houston said, “I hope so. But if they were all washed away, the Lord help the fish down below.”1
1 The information in this article was taken from Jana Bommersbach, “Building on Faith,” True West (June 2005), 20–25.
June 10, 2005 – America's Greatest Mind
Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758) is best remembered for his masterful sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In addition to his achievements as a pastor, Edwards was a father to eight daughters and three sons, missionary to the Housatonic Indians, revivalist, philosopher, and accomplished scientist. From a very early age, Jonathan was mesmerized by the beauty and order of God’s world. In fact, he was especially fond of studying spiders. So much so that his accurate observations have been preserved and are acknowledged in the scientific community today. Even more remarkable is that these observations were made when he was a boy with no tools, training or body of knowledge with which to compare and test his findings. In his childhood work, “Of Insects,” Jonathan wrote “Multitudes of time I have beheld with wonderment and pleasure the spiders marching in the air from one tree to another… their little shining webs and Glistening Strings of a Great Length and at such a height as that one would think they were tack’d to the Sky by one end were it not that they were moving and floating.” As a young man, Jonathan wrote seventy resolutions. One of these resolutions was, “To live with all my might, while I do live.” That he did. Blessed with a brilliant mind, Jonathan Edwards used his brief 55 years to advance the Kingdom of Christ. Many believe Jonathan Edwards was the greatest mind in American history.1
1 Helen K. Hosier, Jonathan Edwards The Great Awakener (Uhrichsville, OH: Barbour Publishing,), 8-13.
June 9, 2005 – Coin Clipping
Exchanging one commodity or service for another commodity or service is called bartering. As long as you needed what the other person had, bartering was a good way to do business. But if you needed something your neighbor had and he didn’t need what you had, you would have to find someone who needed what you had and wanted what the other man had so an exchange could be made. Over time, you can see how complicated bartering could get. One way to fix the logistic problems associated with bartering was to find a commodity that everyone valued and use it as a medium of exchange for everything else. This was most often gold and silver. But how would you know if the gold piece of one trader was as pure as the gold piece of another trader? Gold had to be weighed and certified by an assayer to insure its purity. Assayers were not always around when you needed one.
As time went on, someone had the grand idea of standardizing coinage and stamping it with an image that would be nearly impossible to duplicate. Since gold was a soft metal, it was easy to fabricate, strike, and identify. A simple bite or scratch would identify it as gold. But when there’s a way to make a buck without doing much work, someone will find a way to cheat the system. Since gold coins had smooth edges, it didn’t take much effort to clip just a little gold off the edges while keeping the coin relatively intact. The coin remained virtually the same, but with a few shavings off the edge that no one would notice. If this was done to several coins, a coin clipper would have enough extra gold to exchange for coinage while still being able to hold on to his original coins. This is inflation in action: An increase in the money supply without an actual increase in real money. There had to be a better way to stop coin clipping.
Antoine Boucher, a French machinist, devised a way to stamp coins with raised borders around its circumference and “milled” grooves around the outside edge. If you got a smooth-edged coin, you knew it had been clipped. England struck its first coins with milled edges in 1553, but the process proved costly and was abandoned. People went right back to clipping. In time, putting milled edges on coins became cost effective. This didn’t stop everybody from clipping and putting new edges on the coins. Oliver Cromwell proposed engraving mottoes around the edge of the coins. When this didn’t stop the pilfering, he had coins struck with this message: “The Penalty for Clipping Coins Is Death.” Today, no one bothers with clipping coins since they are no longer made of gold and silver. Even so, the edges of dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollar coins still retain the milled edge. It’s all for decoration. You’ve probably noticed that pennies and nickels have smooth edges. Clipping these coins was not worth the trouble because the metals were so cheap. The penny and dime are so close in size that a blind person might find it difficult to distinguish them. The milled edge on the dime gives its value away.
June 8, 2005 – The Half-Dime and Its Nickel Cousin
A 1913 Liberty Head nickel, one of only five in existence, sold for $4,150,000. It is the second highest price ever paid for any rare coin, and it’s not even gold! Five-cent pieces were first minted by the United States Government in 1794. They weren’t called nickels, because they were made of silver and were called “half-dimes.” As silver prices increased, the “half-dimes” became too expensive to mint. The last “half-dime” was minted in 1873.
A small denomination coin was still needed. The substance had to be as hard as silver and less expensive. In 1866 the United States Mint began making half-dimes made of nickel while the silver half-dimes gradually decreased in production. The name “nickel” was never an official designation for the new coin. Because prices of goods were relatively low prior to the 1960s, nickels were the most popular coins. A phone call could be made with a nickel, and a nickel could be a lot of candy. There were even stores called “five-and-ten-cent stores” or simply “five and dime.” F. W. Woolworth, which closed in 1997, popularized the term with its selection of inexpensive merchandise. There was the movie “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” (1982) which tells the story of a group of middle-aged women who return to the local five and dime store on their twentieth high school reunion and muse over the past.
Like all our “silver” coinage that is no longer silver, today’s nickel isn’t really nickel; it’s an amalgamation of metals. You will notice something unique about the nickel and penny. Their edges are smooth. More about this tomorrow.
June 7, 2005 – Thundering Pulpits
Throughout the colonies leading up to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, ministers regularly delivered sermons on various occasions that addressed the political affairs of the day. The most common type was the Election Day sermon, which was preached every year in the presence of the governor and the newly elected members of the legislature reminding them of their duties as civil magistrates and the requirement that they act virtuously and justly in their public office. Election Day sermons were the primary vehicle used by pastors in New England to articulate their political ideals and justify resistance to British oppression. This is a far cry from today when pastors are counseled to avoid preaching on politics because the ACLU or the IRS might knock on their door. There was greater fear in the eighteenth century. A British soldier might come knocking and haul you off on the charge of treason. By April 1775, the clergymen of America were not only solidly behind the defensive efforts of the colonial leaders, but they were leading the charge against the British. Ministers called on their congregations to take up action and encouraged them to “obey God rather than men.” Many pastors left their pulpits and took up arms and led the men of their congregations into battle.
June 6, 2005 – “Like there was no 28 feet”
The 1968 Summer Olympic Games were held in the rarified air of Mexico City—7400 feet above sea level. Athletes and trainers were concerned that performances by distance runners would be affected by the thin atmosphere. Higher altitudes meant less oxygen, and if there is one thing runners need, it’s lots of oxygen. But it was the unexpected that made these Games memorable. Some of the black athletes put on a political demonstration. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, winning gold and silver in the 200 meters, accepted their medals in bare feet (to bring attention to the poverty of the African-American community), wearing beads (in honor of blacks murdered as victims of slavery or racism), and holding black-gloved fists in the air (the “Black Power” salute).
But over at the finals of the long jump, something historic was about to happen. A lanky jumper from New York was bounding down the runway, and almost no one noticed. Most of the photographers were waiting at the finish line where Lee Evans was expected to finish the 400 meters in record time. This race had excitement written all over it. Jumping records at the Olympic level are broken by inches. In 1936, Jesse Owens owned the long jump record at 26’ 5 ¼. It took 24 years to break it, and only by 3 inches. In 1968, the record stood at 27’ 4 ¾. In a span of 32 years, the record had progressed less than a foot. But on this day, Bob Beamon jumped 29’ 2 ½”, eclipsing the record by nearly two feet—21 ¾ inches! Here’s how Track and Field News described it:
“He was obviously fired up, his step was exactly right, his form bordered perfection, his speed (09.5–100y) came as a great asset, the runway was consistent and fast, the assisting wind read a maximum of 4.473 mph, the high altitude (7350 feet) provided reduced air resistance, and he put together perhaps the ultimate technical effort that all field event performers dream about but rarely realize.”1
After hearing how far he had jumped, Beamon became so excited and emotionally drained that doctors claim he suffered a “cataplectic seizure.” Igor Ter-Ovanesyan, the co-world record holder, remarked, “Compared to this jump, we are as children.” The leap was caught by a cameraman on his first film assignment and is today one of the greatest sports photographs ever shot. The record leap brought an end to Beamon’s career. While he continued to compete, he never got close to that almost magical jump ever again. His longest jump after Mexico City was 26’ 11 1/2”. On August 31, 1991, Mike Powell of the United States finally broke Beamon’s record when he landed 29’ 4 ½” in Tokyo.
1Track & Field News (October/November 1971), 30. Quoted in Ken Doherty, Track and Field Omnibook (Swarthmore, PA: TAFMOP Publishers, 1971), 82.
June 3, 2005 – The University of the South
When the founding of colleges comes up in conversation among Christians, Harvard and Yale are singled out as two institutions with a Christian founding. But there are many more—some nationally known while others only have regional notoriety. In 1860, the cornerstone for the University of the South, located in Sewanee, Tennessee, was laid. The school was the vision of Bishop-General Leonidas Polk (1806–1864). In 1856, he wrote a letter to southern Bishops proposing the establishment of a school “for the advancement of learning . . . and for the propagation of the Gospel.” The school was dedicated to “the cultivation of true Religion, learning and virtue, that thereby God may be glorified , and the happiness of man be advanced.” Polk never saw the reality of his vision. He was killed during the Atlanta campaign on Pine Mountain, Georgia (near Marietta) while he and Generals Johnston and Hardee were on reconnaissance. Bishop Jonathan G. Sherman, speaking at Polk’s 150th birthday anniversary on April 10, 1956, said, “As long as there are those who teach and those who learn on the mountain-top at Sewanee, the name of Leonidas Polk will be remembered among those choice vessels of God's grace, for whom the Church will ever yield to Almighty God most high praise and hearty thanks.”1
1 The material for this article was supplied by Tom Snowden III, “Bishop Leonidas Polk’s Birthday,” The Sewanee Purple, the student newspaper of The University of the South (Easter Semester, April 2005). http://leonidaspolk.org/Bi-Centennial%20Birthday%201%2024.html
June 2, 2005 – It’s A Wonderful Movie
Most children grew up knowing of Bert and Ernie from “Sesame Street.” But before there were Muppets, there were Bert and Ernie—the policeman and cab driver—from the Frank Capra Production of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed and a full stable of character actors. The movie is memorable today because the company that originally produced the movie went bankrupt. The rights to the film passed from one corporation to the next until in 1974 no one remembered to renew its copyright. After 28 years of languishing on the shelf of some corporation, it went into the public domain. This meant that any television station could show the movie any time it wanted and didn’t have to pay anyone any royalties. So for nearly 20 years, It’s a Wonderful Life appeared on hundreds of public and commercial stations every Christmas. There were even It’s a Wonderful Life marathons where it played consecutively throughout the day. When families got together for the holidays, and there wasn’t much to do after catching up with the family news, the kids would plop themselves down with their parents in front of the TV and watch whatever was on, which was mostly It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie that got lost in the morass of financial ruin is now on almost every film critic’s “10 greatest films ever made” list. So why have the ubiquitous showings of the movie nearly disappeared during Christmas? Republic Pictures re-acquired the rights to the film in 1993. Now it costs money to show it. There’s no need to wait until Christmas to watch It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s available on DVD. Still, the best time to watch it is at Christmas just when the sun sets and the snow begins to fall and glisten in the moonlight. Having a fire going also helps to set the mood. For some fun trivia, go to http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0038650/trivia. For an almost scene-by-scene recounting of It’s a Wonderful Life, visit the “Greatest Films” website http://www.filmsite.org/itsa2.html
June 1, 2005 – The Bible George Washington Endorsed
Using celebrities to endorse products is common practice today. Find some famous sports or movie stars, put them in front of a camera, and watch them do their magic with the new product. Before radio and television, the only way to communicate was through oratory and print media. Then there’s the issue of what’s worth pitching and how to pay for it. In colonial America, British law prohibited Bibles from being printed without permission of the crown. Editions of the Bible in the Indian and German languages were permitted, but English translations were verboten. All printing had to take place in England. This all changed after the success of the War for Independence. In 1791, the year the Bill of Rights was adopted and ratified, John Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible was published in New York. Editions of Brown’s Bible had sold well in England. It was only natural to bring its publication to America. Brown, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, selected portions from several well-known commentaries, including those of Matthew Henry’s multi-volume set, to help the general reader better understand the text.
Funds were raised for the project through private “subscriptions” (contributions), and the names of the subscribers were listed alphabetically at the beginning of the volume, along with their occupation and the town where they lived. They came from all walks of life: shoemaker, baker, tailor, butcher, minister, lawyer, and many others. The name heading the list is “GEORGE WASHINGTON, Esq. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” The prestige of Washington’s name associated with the Bible’s publication was a fat endorsement that was sure to attract other subscribes and buyers. Also listed as “subscribers” are Henry Knox (Secretary of War), Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of the Treasury), and John Jay (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), and numerous other notable founders. The Frontispiece offers a perspective on how the Constitution was viewed in light of the Bible. There is an engraving of a female figure holding an open Bible illuminating another female the Constitution rolled up in her hand. Between them stands a woman holding a pole with a Liberty Cap. In the background, the façade of a building includes these words: “Sacred to Liberty, Justice, and Peace.”
EMAIL THIS PAGE TO A FRIEND!
Jeffersonians—“the illuminati, the philosophers, the atheists, and the deists.” Dwight predicted dire consequences if Jefferson and his party were elected: “We may see the Bible cast into a bonfire, the vessels of the sacramental supper borne by an ass in public procession, and our children, either wheedled or terrified, uniting in chanting mockeries against God.”
Rev. William Linn of New York voiced similar concerns over a Jefferson presidency when he proclaimed that “the election of any man avowing the principles of Mr. Jefferson would . . . destroy religion, introduce immorality, and loosen all the bonds of society.” He further warned that “the voice of the nation in calling a deist to the first office must be construed into no less than a rebellion against God.”
Movies have been made about Muhammad Ali, Malcolm X, Ray Charles, Dorothy Dandridge, Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, and Billy Holliday. With the exception of Malcolm X (Little), most African American big-budget movie biographies are about sports figures and entertainers. There are exceptions with smaller scale movies: The Rosa Parks Story (2002), A Woman Called Moses (1978), based on the life of Harriet Tubman, and Something the Lord Made, the story of Vivien Thomas who worked with Dr. Alfred Blalock in developing surgical techniques to correct “Blue-Baby Syndrome” (2004). One of the first biographies I ever read was an old Reader’s Digest story of George Washington Carver: “The Boy Who Was Traded for a Horse.”
After enduring resistance in securing an education in a segregated world, Carver was able to enter Simpson College in Indianola, Iowa, as the first black student where he studied piano and art since the college did not offer science classes. Because of his interest in a career in science, he later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College (now Iowa State University) in 1891, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897. Carver became a member of the faculty of the Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanics (the first black faculty member for Iowa College).
June 28, 2005 – Frankly, I Don’t Give a ______________.”
movie dialog. While Margaret Mitchell spelled it “damn” in her novel Gone With the Wind, the more accurate spelling might have been “dam.” A “dam” is a small Indian coin, similar in value to our penny. So Rhett was actually saying, “The value of my caring isn’t worth a penny.” “I don’t give a tinker’s dam”
June 27, 2005 – Turning Wine into Grape Juice
A young colonist's education in New England was provided by a very limited curriculum, consisting of three books in addition to the Bible: the Hornbook, the New England Primer, and the Bay Psalm Book. The Hornbook consisted of a single piece of parchment, covered with a transparent substance attached to a paddle-shaped piece of wood. The alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, and religious doctrines were written or printed on the parchment.
June 23, 2005 – When Christ Was King at King
June 22, 2005 – Mr. McGuffey and His Readers
Competing textbooks of the same era contained varying amounts of biblical material, but McGuffey contained the greatest amount—“more than three times as much as any other text of the period.”
In the 1920s, Walt Disney began a new career as a cartoonist. A rarity in those days since the industry was almost nonexistent. Most cartooning was done in small newspaper strips. Animation, drawing individual cells of incremental movement, had been done with small picture books. The forerunners to film animation were the thaumatrope (turning marvel), phenakistoscope (spindle viewer), zoetrope (wheel of life), and praxinoscope (action viewer) that let you view a spinning card with small images on it, each image like a single cell in an animated movie. The two 
art forms were put together once film production became possible and profitable. Animation was a labor intensive business. Disney hired additional artists to draw the thousands of still pictures (cells) needed to produce a high quality animated feature. Disney's early success was with an animated character named “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.” The copyright, however, was held by a movie distributor. The distributor, hoping to cut costs, hired the cartoonists outright, eliminating the need to pay Disney. Based on physical assets and general abilities, Disney was not needed. Or was he? When was the last time you saw an Oswald Rabbit cartoon? Where did the distributor go wrong?
“The distributor, with the Disney staff and the copyright on Disney's character, expected to profit from his coup—but without Disney's ideas and fantasies. The physical things—the drawings, the film, and the theaters—were merely vehicles. It was only a matter of time before another set of vehicles could be arranged and the ideas incorporated in a new character—Mickey Mouse—which Disney copyrighted in his own name.”
Roger Williams (1603–1683), founder of the Rhode Island colony, believed that the Church of England had not gone far enough in reforming itself. To the colonists of Massachusetts Bay, Williams's preaching sounded a lot like what European Anabaptists had preached in the sixteenth century—separation and purity no matter what the cost. As a result, the fragile colony of Massachusetts feared that an uprising similar to the one in the German city-state of Münster in 1534 could take place in New England if Williams’s views spread among more radical groups.
On May 28th, 1849, Robert C. Winthrop (1809–1894), descendant of Governor John Winthrop, first governor of Massachusetts Bay Colony, addressed the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Bible Society in Boston with these words:
Johnny Cash had a large repertoire of songs—everything from “Matthew 24 is Knocking at the Door” to “Burning Ring of Fire.” The one song that brings the most laughter to the listener is “A Boy Named Sue.”
Prison before a live but incarcerated audience. Cash hadn’t had the chance to learn the lyrics before he began to belt it out to his demanding audience. He was reading the words as he sang it. If you listen closely, you can hear the shouts of approval from the appreciative crowd of convicts, many of whom could tell stories of their own about abandonment and abuse. Cash commented that it was the most cleverly written song that he had ever heard. The song is about a boy who grows up angry at his father, not only for leaving his family but for naming him Sue. After the boy grows up, he sees his father in a bar and gets in a fight with him because his father gave him a girl’s name. When his father explains that he named him Sue to make sure he would grow up tough, the son embraces his father but still detests his name.
The belief in a Creator-God who is not personal and does not react with his creation was quite fashionable around the time of the War for Independence—but not nearly so fashionable as we have been told. Many historians claim that the Founding Fathers were not Christians, but Deists. Deists believed in a “God” who created all things but does not intervene in the workings of His creation. Most of the Founding Fathers who are said to have been Deists were really what would later be called Unitarians. Unitarians, like Christians, believed in a “God” who both created all things and rules all things by His divine providence. Like Deists, however, Unitarians denied the Trinity: denied that Jesus is God, the second person of the Trinity, and denied that the Holy Spirit is God, the third person of the Trinity.
In the election of 1800, as the Federalists grew more desperate in their battles with the Republicans, they began to sling “mud” at their opponent Thomas Jefferson. Federalist authors attacked Jefferson’s abandonment of 
Christianity and were answered by Republican authors claiming that he was a Christian. (Jefferson was actually what would later be termed a Unitarian, someone who did not believe in the Triune nature of God.) Jefferson occasionally attended church services, but he was not a member of any Christian church. He did not take the presidential oath of office with his hand on the Bible (the only president not to do so). He also refused to proclaim any national days of prayer and thanksgiving. Federalist propagandists saw Jefferson’s unbelief as ushering in an American version of the French Revolution. They warned that if this “howling atheist” were elected, it would prove that God had utterly forsaken the United States, whose people could then expect God’s just vengeance in the form of “dwellings in flames, hoary hairs bathed in blood, female chastity violated ... children writhing on the pike and halberd.” For the most part, Jefferson kept his religious views private. Even his cut-and-paste life of Christ—The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth—remained unpublished in his lifetime. 
When we read about religion in America, most of the attention is placed on the earliest period of settlement—beginning with Jamestown in 1607—and limited to the original 13 colonies. While credit for the settlement of the West “has been given to trappers, explorers, miners, the military, homesteaders and even gunslingers,” history textbooks are nearly silent on the role religion played. Christian History magazine states, “Though history has all but forgotten them, it was Christian preachers and teachers who really tamed the West.” The language used to describe western expansion carried with it religious descriptions such as the “promised land” or “Eden before the fall.” Discovery of gold in California was viewed as a “sign of divine favor.” All of this helps to put journalist Louis O’Sullivan’s words in perspective: “The American claim is by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and possess the whole of the continent, which Providence has given us.” Christianity was not the only religion to make its way west. Of course, there was an indigenous native religion. Led by the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the Roman Catholic Church had settlements in the western frontier before Protestants settled in New England. Historian Ferenc Morton Szasz of the University of New Mexico writes: “The west had no institutions per se—the churches provided the institutions: the hospitals, schools, orphanages, old-age homes and colleges. The state would eventually take them over but at the start, it was the churches. The railroads donated land to the churches because churches meant stability.” Sam Houston’s wife Margaret led him to Christ in 1854. When a friend asked if the baptism he received at Rocky Creek had washed his sins away, Houston said, “I hope so. But if they were all washed away, the Lord help the fish down below.”
Jonathan Edwards (1703 – 1758) is best remembered for his masterful sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” In addition to his achievements as a pastor, Edwards was a father to eight daughters and three sons, missionary to the Housatonic Indians, revivalist, philosopher, and accomplished scientist. From a very early age, Jonathan was mesmerized by the beauty and order of God’s world. In fact, he was especially fond of studying spiders. So much so that his accurate observations have been preserved and are acknowledged in the scientific community today. Even more remarkable is that these observations were made when he was a boy with no tools, training or body of knowledge with which to compare and test his findings. In his childhood work, “Of Insects,” Jonathan wrote “Multitudes of time I have beheld with wonderment and pleasure the spiders marching in the air from one tree to another… their little shining webs and Glistening Strings of a Great Length and at such a height as that one would think they were tack’d to the Sky by one end were it not that they were moving and floating.” As a young man, Jonathan wrote seventy resolutions. One of these resolutions was, “To live with all my might, while I do live.” That he did. Blessed with a brilliant mind, Jonathan Edwards used his brief 55 years to advance the Kingdom of Christ. Many believe Jonathan Edwards was the greatest mind in American history.
Exchanging one commodity or service for another commodity or service is called bartering. As long as you needed what the other person had, bartering was a good way to do business. But if you needed something your neighbor had and he didn’t need what you had, you would have to find someone who needed what you had and wanted what the other man had so an exchange could be made. Over time, you can see how complicated bartering could get. One way to fix the logistic problems associated with bartering was to find a commodity that everyone valued and use it as a medium of exchange for everything else. This was most often gold and silver. But how would you know if the gold piece of one trader was as pure as the gold piece of another trader? Gold had to be weighed and certified by an assayer to insure its purity. Assayers were not always around when you needed one.
Antoine Boucher, a French machinist, devised a way to stamp coins with raised borders around its circumference and “milled” grooves around the outside edge. If you got a smooth-edged coin, you knew it had been clipped. England struck its first coins with milled edges in 1553, but the process proved costly and was abandoned. People went right back to clipping. In time, putting milled edges on coins became cost effective. This didn’t stop everybody from clipping and putting new edges on the coins. Oliver Cromwell proposed engraving mottoes around the edge of the coins. When this didn’t stop the pilfering, he had coins struck with this message: “The Penalty for Clipping Coins Is Death.” Today, no one bothers with clipping coins since they are no longer made of gold and silver. Even so, the edges of dimes, quarters, half-dollars, and dollar coins still retain the milled edge. It’s all for decoration. You’ve probably noticed that pennies and nickels have smooth edges. Clipping these coins was not worth the trouble because the metals were so cheap. The penny and dime are so close in size that a blind person might find it difficult to distinguish them. The milled edge on the dime gives its value away.
A 1913 Liberty Head nickel, one of only five in existence, sold for $4,150,000. It is the second highest price ever paid for any rare coin, and it’s not even gold! Five-cent pieces were first minted by the United States Government in 1794. They weren’t called nickels, because they were made of silver and were called “half-dimes.” As silver prices increased, the “half-dimes” became too expensive to mint. The last “half-dime” was minted in 1873.
A small denomination coin was still needed. The substance had to be as hard as silver and less expensive. In 1866 the United States Mint began making half-dimes made of nickel while the silver half-dimes gradually decreased in production. The name “nickel” was never an official designation for the new coin. Because prices of goods were relatively low prior to the 1960s, nickels were the most popular coins. A phone call could be made with a nickel, and a nickel could be a lot of candy. There were even stores called “five-and-ten-cent stores” or simply “five and dime.” F. W. Woolworth, which closed in 1997, popularized the term with its selection of inexpensive merchandise. There was the movie “Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean” (1982) which tells the story of a group of middle-aged women who return to the local five and dime store on their twentieth high school reunion and muse over the past.
Throughout the colonies leading up to the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, ministers regularly delivered sermons on various occasions that addressed the political affairs of the day. The most common type was the Election Day sermon, which was preached every year in the presence of the governor and the newly elected members of the legislature reminding them of their duties as civil magistrates and the requirement that they act virtuously and justly in their public office. Election Day sermons were the primary vehicle used by pastors in New England to articulate their political ideals and justify resistance to British oppression. This is a far cry from today when pastors are counseled to avoid preaching on politics because the ACLU or the IRS might knock on their door. There was greater fear in the eighteenth century. A British soldier might come knocking and haul you off on the charge of treason. By April 1775, the clergymen of America were not only solidly behind the defensive efforts of the colonial leaders, but they were leading the charge against the British. Ministers called on their congregations to take up action and encouraged them to “obey God rather than men.” Many pastors left their pulpits and took up arms and led the men of their congregations into battle.
The 1968 Summer Olympic Games were held in the rarified air of Mexico City—7400 feet above sea level. Athletes and trainers were concerned that performances by distance runners would be affected by the thin atmosphere. Higher altitudes meant less oxygen, and if there is one thing runners need, it’s lots of oxygen. But it was the unexpected that made these Games memorable. Some of the black athletes put on a political demonstration. Tommie Smith and John Carlos, winning gold and silver in the 200 meters, accepted their medals in bare feet (to bring attention to the poverty of the African-American community), wearing beads (in honor of blacks murdered as victims of slavery or racism), and holding black-gloved fists in the air (the “Black Power” salute).
When the founding of colleges comes up in conversation among Christians, Harvard and Yale are singled out as two institutions with a Christian founding. But there are many more—some nationally known while others only have regional notoriety. In 1860, the cornerstone for the University of the South, located in Sewanee, Tennessee, was laid. The school was the vision of Bishop-General Leonidas Polk (1806–1864). In 1856, he wrote a letter to southern Bishops proposing the establishment of a school “for the advancement of learning . . . and for the propagation of the Gospel.” The school was dedicated to “the cultivation of true Religion, learning and virtue, that thereby God may 
be glorified , and the happiness of man be advanced.” Polk never saw the reality of his vision. He was killed during the Atlanta campaign on Pine Mountain, Georgia (near Marietta) while he and Generals Johnston and Hardee were on reconnaissance. Bishop Jonathan G. Sherman, speaking at Polk’s 150th birthday anniversary on April 10, 1956, said, “As long as there are those who teach and those who learn on the mountain-top at Sewanee, the name of Leonidas Polk will be remembered among those choice vessels of God's grace, for whom the Church will ever yield to Almighty God most high praise and hearty thanks.”
Most children grew up knowing of Bert and Ernie from “Sesame Street.” But before there were Muppets, there were Bert and Ernie—the policeman and cab driver—from the Frank Capra Production of It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed and a full stable of character actors. The movie is memorable today because the company that originally produced the movie went bankrupt. The rights to the film passed from one corporation to the next until in 1974 no one remembered to renew its copyright. After 28 years of languishing on the shelf of some corporation, it went into the public domain. This meant that any television station could show the movie any time it wanted and didn’t have to pay anyone any royalties. So for nearly 20 years, It’s a Wonderful Life appeared on hundreds of public and commercial stations every Christmas. There were even It’s a Wonderful Life marathons where it played consecutively throughout the day. When families got together for the holidays, and there wasn’t much to do after catching up with the family news, the kids would plop themselves down with their parents in front of the TV and watch whatever was on, which was mostly It’s a Wonderful Life. The movie that got lost in the morass of financial ruin is now on almost every film critic’s 
Using celebrities to endorse products is common practice today. Find some famous sports or movie stars, put them in front of a camera, and watch them do their magic with the new product. Before radio and television, the only way to communicate was through oratory and print media. Then there’s the issue of what’s worth pitching and how to pay for it. In colonial America, British law prohibited Bibles from being printed without permission of the crown. Editions of the Bible in the Indian and German languages were permitted, but English translations were verboten. All printing had to take place in England. This all changed after the success of the War for Independence. In 1791, the year the Bill of Rights was adopted and ratified, John Brown’s Self-Interpreting Bible was published in New York. Editions of Brown’s Bible had sold well in England. It was only natural to bring its publication to America. Brown, a Scottish Presbyterian minister, selected portions from several well-known commentaries, including those of Matthew Henry’s multi-volume set, to help the general reader better understand the text.
Funds were raised for the project through private “subscriptions” (contributions), and the names of the subscribers were listed alphabetically at the beginning of the volume, along with their occupation and the town where they lived. They came from all walks of life: shoemaker, baker, tailor, butcher, minister, lawyer, and many others. The name heading the list is “GEORGE WASHINGTON, Esq. PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.” The prestige of Washington’s name associated with the Bible’s publication was a fat endorsement that was sure to attract other subscribes and buyers. Also listed as “subscribers” are Henry Knox (Secretary of War), Alexander Hamilton (Secretary of the Treasury), and John Jay (Chief Justice of the Supreme Court), and numerous other notable founders. The Frontispiece offers a perspective on how the Constitution was viewed in light of the Bible. There is an engraving of a female figure holding an open Bible illuminating another female the Constitution rolled up in her hand. Between them stands a woman holding a pole with a Liberty Cap. In the background, the façade of a building includes these words: “Sacred to Liberty, Justice, and Peace.”
