When our founding fathers rose and declared that liberty was
their birthright, and the right of all their posterity forever
after, they did not do so in a vacuum. They were born into a
culture of free men, dedicated to individual thought, individual
effort, and individual success. They were raised and educated in
the Word of God, as taught in the Bible; that all men were sons
of God, created in His likeness, and endowed with a Holy spark
of His spiritual essence. To truly understand what they wrote,
we must put on the mantle of their perspective – with study and
contemplation we must recreate, in our own minds, the social,
spiritual, and cultural environment in which they lived and
worked. This is not as difficult as it seems – but it requires
that we study our history, and not with an attention for dates
and places, but with our attention focused upon what people
believed important and/or pressing in that day. The social,
moral, political, and financial issues of the American colonial
era are actually not so