“One Little Hour”

In 1787, the Pennsylvania Convention was debating the merits and demerits of the proposed new, federal constitution. The Federalists supported ratification and a strong, central government. The Antifederalists feared giving a national government more power and criticized the constitution’s lack of a guarantee of individual rights.

The Federalists commanded a majority in the Convention but did not possess a two-thirds majority, the number necessary for a quorum. Ratification required only a simple majority, but without a quorum the proposal could not be considered. The outnumbered Antifederalists stayed home to prevent passage. They knew that a small fine was the only penalty for failing to attend a session of the Convention. The annoyed Federalists promptly sent out a Sergeant-at-Arms to “inform” the absent representatives that their presence was requested. Here’s the Sergeant-at-Arms relaying his account of what followed:

I saw Colonel Piper [one of the missing representatives]…at a great distance. I went after them to the corner of Arch and Sixth streets. I saw Mr. Bar, and Mr. Findley, Colonel Piper, and some other member going toward Market Street. Mr. Findley looked round and saw me, as I supposed, for he mended his pace.

Mended indeed! Mr. Findley evaded the Sergeant, but James M’Calmont was not so fortunate. The Sergeant, accompanied by a mob, surrounded him and accompanied him to the Assembly. (A mob eight years earlier in Philadelphia had killed several politicians, so I doubt he resisted much.) With M’Calmont in attendance, quorum was met and debate set to begin. But first, James M’Calmont stood to protest his forced attendance.

James M’Calmont informed the House, that he had been forcibly brought into the Assembly room, contrary to his wishes, this morning by a number of the citizens, whom he did not know, and that therefore, he begged he might be dismissed the House.

The Federalists couldn’t actually admit to having incited a mob, of course, so they immediately disputed M’Calmont’s interpretation.

Alexander Lowrey: I hope, as the gentleman says he was forcibly brought, he will give some reason why force was necessary to make him do his duty; and what reason can he give now he is here, that should induce us to part with him again? Surely his being brought by force and against his wishes is not a reason that he should be suffered to go off again.

Ha! M’Calmont should’ve been here anyways. So, if you think about it, we were really helping him out. Kinda like a mob-ish alarm clock. We were just helping him do his duty.

The next speaker, Thomas FitzSimons, denied having anything to do with forcing M’Calmont to come.

Thomas FitzSimons would be glad to know if any member of the House was guilty of forcing the gentleman from the determination of absenting himself; if there was, he thought it necessary that the House mark such conduct with their disapprobation. But we are to consider, sir, that the member is now here, and that the business of the state cannot be accomplished if anyone is suffered to withdraw; from which consideration I conclude, it will be extremely improper for any member to leave this House until the laws and other unfinished business is completed.

You gotta love FitzSimons. Not only did we have nothing to do with forcing M’Calmont to come, we would condemn such conduct in the harshest terms! But, well, since he’s here and all…it wouldn’t be exactly right to let him leave us hanging, right?

M’Calmont was a sharp cookie, however, and asked that the clerk read the Assembly’s rules. Sure enough, those who did not answer the roll call just had to pay a five shilling fine.

James M’Calmont then rose from his place, and putting his hand in his pocket took out some loose silver and said, well, sir, here is your five shillings, so let me go.

I like to think M’Calmont made a dramatic gesture, casting the coins to the floor with flashing eyes, but we don’t know. It did have comic effect apparently in the peanut gallery.

This ludicrous circumstance occasioned a loud laugh in the gallery. And the Speaker told him that the person who had been appointed to receive the fines was not in his place; but, if he was, the member ought not to pay it, as he had not broke the rule, which declared those persons only finable, who did not appear and answer to their names; he had done both and therefore might retain his money.

Convenient. Oh, you know, I really wish I could take your money, but our money guy’s out getting a coffee or something. So sorry. But, hey, there’s some good news in all of this too. Wait for it…you don’t owe us the money after all! Surprise! You get to stay for free! Aren’t you the lucky one?!

Another Federalist legislator stood up to express his indignation at M’Calmont’s complaints.

Gerardus Wynkoop expressed some amaze at the argument of the gentleman. The member, Mr. M’Calmont, had sworn to do the duties he was delegated to; there had been nothing of force in that, and he should not, for his part, think himself at liberty to withdraw, until the business was completed, nor could he think any member ought. He would call on the gentleman to assign his reason for absconding from his duty, at the bar of the House, where he might be heard as to his complaint.

James M’Calmont replied, he was not to be called to the bar of this House, he had to answer for his conduct at another bar.

Slam! Take that you stuffy Federalists. God trumps Caesar, ha!

But the Federalists still needed M’Calmont to have a quorum. Let’s return to the old, “It wasn’t us,” argument again.

Daniel Clymer was of opinion the member was within the power of the House by being present. … He was for punishing every person who had ill treated the gentleman; however faulty his conduct was, it belonged not to individuals to punish; that was to be left to the judges, who, no doubt, will see the laws properly executed.

Not our problem. Now back to business.

But then that pesky M’Calmont made a run for it and tried to leave the room. A phalanx of Federalist supporters helpfully blocked the entrance and M’Calmont resigned himself to staying put. He did manage to throw another monkey wrench in the session by proposing that the Convention move to Lancaster, a proposal that earned the backing of the Federalist representative from Lancaster but which annoyed everyone else.

After the Convention ratified the federal constitution, M’Calmont and most of the other Antifederalist representatives issued a public protest. They complained about the lack of a bill of rights and the treatment of M’Calmont among other things. They feared that the federal government would repress individual rights. The abuse M’Calmont suffered at Federalist hands seemed to validate their fears. The Federalists own words were hardly reassuring:

The House showed a wonderful good temper on so provoking an occasion when a misdemeanor had been committed of a kind, which, tho it has hitherto escaped even the slightest punishment, is deserving of the highest; when the addressers had by their conduct violated the first condition of all political society, which obliges the few to give way to the many.

The meaning may seem unclear to modern readers, but here Fitzsimons, Clymer, and the other Federalists accuse M’Calmont and the Antifederalists of treason. How dare they go against the majority!

Clearly, Antifederalists’ fears of tyranny and despotism were rooted in actual experiences of the abuse of power by the state. Their complaints foreshadow Tocqueville’s famous phrase, the “tyranny of the majority.”

Stories like M’Calmont’s remind me that history was made by real people and is not just the high-minded documents that get placed under glass or the inspirational speeches that schoolchildren memorize. It also reminds me that the winners write the histories. Did you learn much about the Antifederalists in school? Despite what our textbooks imply by silence, there was no consensus on the new Constitution. It almost didn’t pass, although the ham-handed efforts just described certainly helped.

And yes. Any resemblance to present day politics is strictly coincidental but entirely welcome.

[Merrill Jensen, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Vol II: Pennsylvania, 104-108, 120]

In The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek attempted to show the socialist intellectual roots of German National Socialism in order to combat claims that fascism was a capitalist reaction. He was Austrian so the appeal to continental history made sense, but there were examples closer to his new home.

Sir Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists in the 1930s, but before that he was a Labour minister. This paragraph shows the shared intellectual origins of fascism and socialism in Great Britain:

If MacDonald disliked turning to the Liberals, then there were the ideas of Sir Oswald Mosley and Ernest Bevin within his own ranks. Mosley, a junior Minister in the Labour Government, was frustrated at the lack of drastic action on the unemployment question, and the Mosley Memorandum of 1930 was a mixture of ideas: loan-financed public works, early and increased retirement pensions, reorganisation of banking, import control and state credit for industrial development. Part Keynesian liberalism, part Hobsonian socialism and part Italian fascism, the Mosley Memorandum was a remarkable document, acceptance of which by the Labour Government would surely have made Mosley a future Labour leader.

Derek Fraser, “The Evolution of the British Welfare State,” 207.

In his biography of J. Frank Norris, historian Barry Hankins describes the Southern Baptist fundamentalist in unflattering terms:

For a long time while researching and writing this work I tried to balance Norris’s positive contributions and commendable efforts with his moral lapses and ethical blind spots. I finally concluded that such a balanced Norris was inaccurate. Sadly, in this book one will find an important American religious figure who often exhibited an almost complete disregard for basic standards of civility and honesty – so much so that even other fundamentalists who agreed with Norris on virtually all issues could not long tolerate his antics. Nearly every important fundamentalist with whom Norris aligned himself eventually broke ranks and denounced him.

(Barry Hankins, God’s Rascal: J. Frank Norris and the Beginnings of Southern Fundamentalism, 4)

Compare Hankin’s summary to this story from Bob Jones Jr.’s Cornbread and Caviar:

“I remember once when I was a boy about fifteen, I said to my dad, ‘I have been listening to a man on the radio named Frank Norris.  He sounds like a good preacher. Did you ever work with him?

He said, ‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘He answered, “Because I did not want him for an enemy.”  Then he went on to explain that almost everybody Frank Norris worked with he eventually turned against.’

(Bob Jones Jr., Cornbread and Caviar, 122)

Slate has a good article discussing the question of why the internet has not improved productivity. The second paragraph from the bottom of the first page is particularly insightful. Perhaps we are using the wrong measuring stick?

But revenue is not always the end-all, be-all—even in economics. That brings us to a final explanation: Maybe it is not the growth that is deficient. Maybe it is the yardstick that is deficient. MIT professor Erik Brynjolffson explains the idea using the example of the music industry. “Because you and I stopped buying CDs, the music industry has shrunk, according to revenues and GDP. But we’re not listening to less music. There’s more music consumed than before.” The improved choice and variety and availability of music must be worth something to us—even if it is not easy to put into numbers. “On paper, the way GDP is calculated, the music industry is disappearing, but in reality it’s not disappearing. It is disappearing in revenue. It is not disappearing in terms of what you should care about, which is music.”

Frederick William Hotchkiss graduated from Yale in 1778 at the age of sixteen. His father and two uncles were killed by the British the following year. He pastored The First Church of Christ (Congregational) in Old Saybrook Connecticutt for fifty-five years beginning in 1783.

In the year 1798, after Mr. Hotchkiss had held the pastoral office about fifteen years, he passed through a marked Christian experience which so deepened his conviction of the heinousness of sin and so enlarged his views of the atonement, as to constitute the beginning of a new and higher Christian life. He was sometimes led to speak of it as a second, if not a first, conversion. On the 6th of November of that year he was at his mother’s house in New Haven, on a visit, when after having retired at night to his bed he was ‘seized suddenly with a most alarming sense and awful view of sin and danger of destruction, of being abandoned of God and being given up to remediless ruin.’ So terrible was his distress that he felt that he should sink under the burden. He sought his mother’s chamber, hoping to find relief in her counsels and prayers. In the morning there was ‘unusual gloom, but less terror,’ in his feelings. On returning home his troubles of mind followed him and were the frequent theme of conversation with his wife. For a year or more he continued under the cloud, but gradually he was able to lay hold on Christ fully as an all-sufficient Savior, with a comfortable hope of forgiveness through Him. …

He had no relish for controversy; but, well-grounded in the great doctrines of Scripture, his interest was absorbed in their practical bearing. In his own language, ‘The great truths of our holy religion are few and plain to be understood, – comprised in two short sentences, vis.: Man entirely lost by sin; and the sinner saved by sovereign grace.’ Upon these themes in their almost infinite variety of aspect and application, he was never tired of preaching, and his people never tired of hearing. …

Amen.

(n.a., The First Church of Christ (Congregational), Old Saybrook (Middletown, Conn.: J. S. Stewart, 1896): 48, 50)

From “Death of Charles Carroll,” an article in the Christian Index on 24 November 1832:

The last of the signers is dead! The only remaining link which connected this generation with the past, with that illustrious race of statesmen, philanthropists and patriots, the founders of American independence, and the benefactors of the world, now and for all time hereafter – is broken. The brotherhood of glory is re-united above, and Carroll is removed from the love, gratitude, and veneration of the living, to an association with the kindred spirits of Washington and his associates, the departed patriarchs of liberty. Henceforth the Declaration of Independence is sacred to history – part of the mighty past. The last of the signers is dead!

With the anniversary of the 2010 earthquake in Haiti that claimed the lives of over one hundred thousand, it is appropriate to ask again, “Is God far away when tragedy strikes?” Lecrae’s benefit single “Far Away” is a multi-layered response to that question and a profoundly affecting example Psalmody.

First, read through the lyrics:

Far Far Away (You feel) Far Away. (You Seem) Far Away.. So So (x2)

Hopeless!
I can spell it
I can smell it in the air.
Lotta people wonder if you still care.
And are you still there?
Cuz I dun lost it all
I keep calling your name
But do you hear my call
And are you still involved
Or am I left alone?
I wander the streets
Cuz I no longer have a home.
My brothers all GONE
My sisters all GONE
My families and my friends aint gonna be here in the mornin’
Ya see me here mournin’
They say you feel my pain
They say you went through it
Say to die is to gain
But I ain’t gain nothin’
I lost everybody
Now Im losing my mind
And my faith is all I’m countin’
I’m still holdin’ on
Thats why I still pray
Feelin’ empty inside
I can’t make it through today.
I dont know what else to do
I dont know what else to say
I’m talking to ya now
But I promise you feel so far

Far Far Away (You feel) Far Away. (You Seem) Far Away.. So So (x4)

Dear hope: Been waitin’ on ya for a while now
Been cut so deep that I ain’t sure if I can smile now
Look at this devastation
Look at the pain and sorrow
Somebody fed me lies and promised me a bright tomorrow
I know the God I follow
Is bigger than disaster
Big enough to handle
Any evil that harasses
But I feel like he passed us
Pain overtook us
Buildings tumbled over head
As the ground shook us
God have you forsook us
Lord you still with me
I know you save souls
I trust you to forgive me
Relief can you hear me?
Hey Rest can you get me?
Hey Peace can you see me?
Hey Love can you heal me?
I don’t know what to do
I ain’t looking for answers
I just need you to hold my hand
Through this cancer
Tell me you never left
Even in the midst of death
Breathe on me, I’ll do anything to feel your Breath!

Far Far Away (You feel) Far Away. (You Seem) Far Away.. So So (x4)

(PSALMS 62:5-8)
5. For God alone, O my soul, wait in silence,
for my hope is from him.
6. He only is my rock and my salvation,
my fortress; I shall not be shaken.
7. On God rests my salvation and my glory;
my mighty rock, my refuge is God.
8. Trust in him at all times, O people; pour out your heart before him;
God is a refuge for us.

(Far far away.) He’s not (Far Away) He’s not (Far Away) He’s not (Far Away)

You know our God is not (Far far away) Our God is not (Far Away) Even though he seems.

We love you Lord. We love you Lord. We trust that You are not that far away. (x2)

Then, watch the music video.

The first stanza is similar to a psalm of lament in which the speaker questions God. Looking around at the devastation all around he asks “are you still there?” and “do you still care?” He then expresses his intense pain by describing the loss of his family, friends, and home. He acknowledges that God went through tragedy Himself, a reference to the death of Jesus on the cross, but although Phillippians 1:21 promises that “to die is to gain,” the speaker does not feel like he has gained anything. Still, he acknowledges his desperate need of God; he is just “holding on,” feeling “empty inside,” and doesn’t “know what else to do.”

Then, the  refrain/chorus/hook summarizes and intensifies the mood of the first stanza. God seems and feels to be so “far far away.”

The second stanza again mentions the pain of loss; the speaker is “cut so deep” that he doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to smile again. Intellectually, the speaker is aware that God is “big enough to handle any evil that harasses” but it still feels as though “he passed us.” The speaker echoes Christ on the Cross, ”God have you forsook us?” (and Psalm 22). He wants reassurance that God is still with him – “tell me you never left, even in the midst of death” –  and acknowledges the creative and redemptive power of God – “breathe on me, I’ll do anything to feel your breath!”

Again, the  refrain/chorus/hook summarizes and intensifies the mood of the second stanza like that of the first. God seems and feels to be so “far far away.”

The bridge is Psalm 62:5-8 (ESV) and prepares the speaker (and the listeners) to face the climax of the song. God is an unmovable rock, an unconquerable fortress, a reliable refuge. His people can trust in Him for salvation. When the bridge ends, the speaker utters “yeah,” the modern-day equivalent of the “selah” after verse 8. Selah is a hard word to translate, but it expresses agreement and a desire to meditate on the truth of the preceding passage.

Finally, the conclusion of the song is the recognition that the God who previously seemed so far away was really not. In light of God’s promises, the speaker exhorts his listeners to remember that “our God is not far away.” While the refrain/chorus/hook emphasized the seeming distance of God following the first and second stanzas, that same refrain now announces that God has been close all along. Using the same words – “far away” – to describe both God’s distance and nearness highlights the speaker’s change in perspective. God had been constant; it was the speaker for whom God seemed far away.

Lecrae’s song is a psalm. Like King David millenia ago, the speaker first questions God, then remembers and clings to His promises, and finally delights in God’s presence. That beautiful narrative is further intensified by the music and the filmography. For example, notice the backbeat, the musical foundation of the tune. That beat is removed at the beginning of the bridge (Psalm 62) and then returns halfway through right as the speaker cites “on God rests my salvation.” Just as our salvation rests on the foundation of God’s promises, the music rests upon the backbeat. That removal and return also reminds the listener that the beat was there all along, a picture of God presence even in the midst of tragedy. Likewise, the snare that accompanies the words “I shall not be shaken” evokes shaking, audibly intensifying the backbeat when it returns.

The images fit the message as well. The despair that the speaker describes is illustrated by the injured people (2:21), sad children (2:24), material loss (2:33), and the destruction of the physical church (1:04, 1:28, 1:38). But that despair and suffering is then transmuted to joy with smiles (3:01), Bible reading (3:03), and an outdoor church (3:16).

The words, music, and images remind us that God is good even when our circumstances are terrible. Even when God seems far away, He is with us. In the midst of the earthquake in Haiti, God was there. If you go to iTunes and purchase a copy of the song, the money will be donated to the charity Churches Helping Churches.

It is the third Sunday of Advent, Gaudete Sunday. Let us rejoice that the Savior comes soon!

Here’s the King Singer’s version.

From bizzaro land: a morbidly obese woman in Cleveland needs an MRI but can’t fit into any MRI machines designed for people because she is too fat. Her doctor investigated another option:

‘We thought that it might be possible for Terri to have an MRI at the Cleveland Zoo in the machine used for the elephants and rhinos but the zoo does not have a  licence for humans.’

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1337077/World-s-fattest-woman-Terri-Smith-told-Diet-die-hitting-50-STONE.html

The video series that I’ve posted on before, Tim Keller’s The Prodigal God, is viewable in full online. The entire presentation is less than 45 minutes long.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/Thorrison/videos/1/

http://www.viddler.com/explore/Thorrison/videos/2/

http://www.viddler.com/explore/Thorrison/videos/3/

http://www.viddler.com/explore/Thorrison/videos/4/