England in History


The Foundation of Civilization

 

 

 “The Battle of Britain,” said Winston Churchill on the 18th of June 1940, “is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization.”1 Churchill saw something in his nation’s history and moral composition that made him identify Christianity with the preservation and advance of civilization. England had a long history of Christian influence that resulted in the advance of civilization around the world. America’s earliest founders did not break from their English heritage. In fact, they sought to establish old England in New England. Samuel Eliot Morison writes the following in his Builders of the Bay Colony:

 

New England was founded consciously, and in no fit of absence of mind. Patriots seeking the glory of England first called the attention of their countrymen to these shores. Commercial enterprise made the first attempts at settlement. Puritanism overlaid these feeble beginnings by a proud self-governing commonwealth, dedicated to the glory of God and the happiness of a peculiar people. These three main streams in the life of old England, the patriotic, the commercial, and the religious, mingled their waters on every slope.2

 

It’s no wonder that John Winthrop described colonial America as a “City on a Hill,” a light to the nations.

 

1 Quoted in John Baillie, What is Christian Civilization? (London, England: Oxford University Press, 1945), 5.

2 Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, [1930] 1981),3.

 

American Vision P.O. Box 220, Powder Springs, GA 30127, 800-628-9460, www.americanvision.org . History Unwrapped by Gary DeMar

 

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