2. Tending the Garden

For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil.

– Romans 13:4

And He Himself gave some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of ministry…

– Ephesians 4:11-12

Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens.

– Daniel Webster

According to a University of Houston study of roughly 15,000 writings of the Founding Fathers, the most often quoted sources used by the Founding Fathers were:¹

Resistance to sudden violence for the preservation not only of my person, my limbs, and life, but of my property, is an indisputable right of nature which I never surrendered to the public by the compact of society and which, perhaps, I could not surrender if I would. The maxims of the law and the precepts of Christianity are precisely coincident in relation to this subject.

– John Adams

The great natural law of self-preservation cannot be repealed or superseded or suspended by any human institution. The right of the citizens to bear arms in the defense of themselves shall not be questioned. Every man’s house is deemed by the law to be his castle; and the law invests him with the power and places on him the duty of the commanding officer of his house. Every man’s house is his castle, and if anyone be robbed in it, it shall be esteemed his own default and negligence.

– James Wilson

I will to my dying day oppose with all the powers and faculties God has given me, all such instruments of slavery and villainy as a writ of assistance is. It is the worst instrument of arbitrary power and is destructive of liberty and the fundamental principles of law. One of the most essential rights is the freedom of one’s house – a man’s house is his castle, but these writs totally annihilate this right. It is a power that places the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer…who may reign secure in his petty tyranny and spread terror and desolation around him. Both reason and the Constitution are against such writs.

– James Otis

Founding Father John Adams would later recall the speech by James Otis in this way:

American independence was then and there born…Every man in the crowded audience went away, as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there the child Independence was born. In fifteen years, namely in 1776, he grew up to manhood and declared himself free.

– John Adams

When you make a loan of any kind to your neighbor, do not go into their house to get what is offered to you as a pledge. Stay outside and let the neighbor to whom you are making the loan bring the pledge out to you.

– Deuteronomy 24:10-11