The American Creed
A Spiritual and Patriotic Primer
Chapter One
"A City on a Hill"
"In the beginning all the world was America."
-John Locke,
Second Treatise on Government, 49, 1
In the beginning, when God created heaven and earth, all
the world was a wilderness. This wilderness was populated first
by ferns and then by animals. Hundreds of millions of years
later, as a home to aboriginal peoples scattered in pockets around
the globe, the world was a forbidding garden. Slowly, this garden
was cultivated. With cultivation came civilization; city-states
became nations; nations, empires. Where advanced
civilizations flourished, nature was conquered and society
tamed. But a new wilderness beckoned. The virgin American
woods had their own story, an oral history passed down by
Shamans of a hundred tribes. To European eyes, however,
America was a second Eden. Long since driven from the garden,
the first white settlers brought to America their own ancestral
legends of creation and fall as contained in the Bible ... read full excerpt from The American Creed ebook
