I am made to wonder, after reading several books on the founding fathers and their original feelings and thoughts concerning the Constitution, if those men would be both amazed and indignant about how their child has been transformed into some kind of weird and grotesque creature bearing little resemblance to the innocent and bright-eyed babe they once swaddled in their own fortunes and lives?
Man in his never ending quest to make the letter fit the man rather than the man made to fit the letter have, for all practical purposes, not only suffocated the once viable principles but have in most cases reversed their original intent. This also we have witnessed in the church world.
The Constitution, when it was signed, Benjamin Franklin, the well-travelled bard of early America who invented everything from the lightning rod to a method of playing glass as a musical instrument, and who once represented the American colonies as their resident envoy in London, commented that he wondered if a carving on the back of the Chair occupied by the President of the Convention. “I have often wondered at length if the sun on the back of the President’s chair is rising or setting. Today I have the satisfaction of knowing that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
But, could it be, that today….. that it is a setting sun?
-jlg-