Home > Work > The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic
1 " Surprisingly, the most passionate voice calling for an immediate end to the “infernal traffic” in captive Africans came from the Virginia delegation. George Mason, a wealthy plantation owner and brilliant lawyer who personally owned more than two hundred slaves, had come to see slavery as “a slow Poison…daily contaminating the Minds and Morals of our People.” He argued that holding slaves would “bring the judgment of heaven on a Country…As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities. "
― Michael Medved , The American Miracle: Divine Providence in the Rise of the Republic
2 " Since the days of the Pilgrims, leaders of the new society that arose in the New World have embraced the core concept of a divinely determined destiny. For nearly four hundred years, Americans nourished the notion that God maintained an intimate, protective connection to their singular nation. Only recently, with the emphasis on guilt over gratitude in our teaching of history, has the public grown uncomfortable with the idea that fate favors American endeavors. Today, the merest suggestion that the Almighty plays favorites among the nations of the world strikes contemporary sensibilities as offensive, outrageous, or at least controversial. "