Alexander Tyler Fraser (1748-1813 observed, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with a result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy and is always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations has been 200 years. The nations have progressed through the following sequence—
*From bondage to spiritual faith
*From spiritual faith to great courage
*From courage to liberty
*From liberty to abundance
*From abundance to selfishness
*From selfishness to complacency
*From complacency to apathy
*From apathy to dependency
*From dependency back to bondage.”
In the end, republics established on the principle of freedom, lapse back into the bondage from which they arose. Why? Human sin is controlling. Humanity is too sinful to preserve liberty! Therefore, our hope and trust must always be in the Lord.
Bill,
thanks for sharing.
Here is a little something from C.S.Lewis:
It was written in 1948 after the dawn of the atomic age.
In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.