"WHO SHOULD BE OUR RULERS?"

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By R. Andrew Meyers - Posted at Log College Press:

For a society of professing Christians, to agree to employ none in any of their principal offices of service in the State, but such as profess Christianity, appears to be no more than a proper mark of respect paid to themselves, as a body, and to the Christian religion they profess, and cannot therefore, in that point of view be condemned. ...

GEORGE DUFFIELD ASKS, "WHO SHOULD BE OUR RULERS?"


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When a committee headed by Benjamin Franklin was formed to prepare a Constitution for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1776, Bishop William White was called upon to lead in prayer, while Presbyterian minister (also chaplain to the Continental Congress) George Duffield II (1732-1790) drafted an essay outlining Biblical principles for the selection of civil magistrates to aid in the work. He added brief remarks to the essay in 1787, but it was not published until his grandson, George Duffield V (1818-1888), included it in his The God of Our Fathers: An Historical Sermon (1861).

The title — Who Should Be Our Rulers? — is immediately expanded upon with this question:

Query. — May a community of professing Christians, of right require any profession of the Christian faith of those appointed to bear rule among them, previous to their admission to office, or make a profession of Christianity, a suspending term of their being admitted to any of the principal offices in the state?

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