CHARLOTTE – On America’s 61st birthday, our 6th President, John Quincey Adams began his commemorative speech with rhetorical questions:

“Why is it friends and fellow citizens that we are assembled here?  And why is it, that entering the 62nd year of our nations existence that you have asked me to address you?  Why is it that next to the birthday of the Savior of the world that the most joyous and venerated festival occurs on this day?  Is it not that in the chain of human events the birthday of a nation is indissolubly linked to the birthday of the Savior?  That it forms a leading event in the progress of the gospel dispensation.”

He concludes:

“Is it not that the Declaration of Independence first organized the social compact on the foundation of the Redeemer’s mission on earth?  That it laid the cornerstone of human government on the first precepts of Christianity.”

What are the first precepts of Christianity?  Jesus said that all the law and the prophets hang on the following two commandments: “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind” and “Love your neighbor as yourself”.  The latter provides the foundation from which we get the so-called “Golden Rule”, that is: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.”

Signer of the Constitution, James McHenry reasoned: “Public utility pleads most forcibly for the general distribution of the Holy Scriptures…[These] can alone secure to society, order and peace, and to our courts of justice and constitutions of government; purity, stability, and usefulness.  In vain, without the Bible, we increase penal laws and draw entrenchments around our institutions.  Where [the Holy Scriptures] abound, men cannot pursue wicked courses.”

Independence Day will continue to exist only if we remember America’s Godly Heritage and restore America’s Biblical foundation.