A
little while ago, I was hiking up a mountain in Lake George, NY with my father,
two brothers, and youngest sister.
Happily the mountain was a very small one, for my father and I probably
could have handled little more. As we
huffed and puffed in growing fatigue, my sister, then about 5 minutes ahead of
us, waited for us to catch up and then told us about some disfavor she had
fallen into at her work. In response, I
told her about a tyrant who once showed a visitor to his garden. Among the plants in the garden, one had grown
above the rest. The tyrant showed his
visitor about the garden and as they approached the one plant that grew above
the rest, the tyrant pulled out a machete and quickly cut it down to the level
of the others. The message was clear: no
subject must be allowed to rise above the rest.
Tyranny can tolerate mediocrity but never excellence.
The
tyrant in question might have been any number of men over the years. It might have been Napoleon Stalin, or Henry
VIII. Robert Bolton captured well the attitude
of Henry VIII toward the few men that dared raise their heads above the rest,
toward the few plants that dared grow above their appointed bounds. When Henry VIII broke with Rome and declared
himself the head of the Church of England, he demanded that everyone follow
him. Nearly everyone did—but nearly was
not enough. When almost everyone else
went along, Thomas More, did not. He did
not speak or write against Henry, he simply remained silent. One silent man perhaps should not have seemed
too much of a threat to Henry VIII, but Henry did not want More’s silence, but
his approval. When everyone else
supported Henry, why should one silent man have bothered him so much? Bolton’s Henry, speaking to More, gave the
answer:
Because you're honest... and what is
more to the purpose, you're known to
be honest. There are those like Norfolk who follow me because I wear the crown;
and those like Master Cromwell who follow me because they are jackals with
sharp teeth and I'm their tiger; there's a mass that follows me because it
follows anything that moves. And then there's you...
The
existence of even one good man is a spur in the conscience of the wicked. The existence of one good man tells the rest
of the world what it should be and
that it should not be what it is. Even
schoolchildren know this; it is why they dislike excellence in their
classmates. Henry stood condemned not by
any word of Thomas More’s, but by his existence. He stood judged not by a letter of More’s, but
by his very life. Faced with this
condemnation, Henry could have beaten his own breast in repentance, or he could
have beaten More’s head off. He did the
latter.
More
was not the first to lose his head to the tyrant’s blade. John the Baptist lost his head in like
circumstances to the same sort of petty tyrant.
King Herod had married his brother’s wife while his brother was still
living and John forbade him this. John
was only one weak prophet. He had no
armies and was no threat Herod, save that he threatened his conscience. But that was enough. John was a good man, known to be a good man
and hence by his very existence condemned Herod. And so Herod (and his wife) had to destroy
John. If there were only one good man
(or woman) in a bad world, the world would have to destroy that one man. How could it not, when on a gibbet before the
nations, it unfurled goodness itself (1)?
The
same persecution is still the case even today.
Many supporters of same-sex “marriage” insist they simply want to be “married”
and will leave everyone else alone. But
this is not true. There are multiple
examples of bakeries refusing to make a cake in celebration of a same-sex
wedding, and being attacked because of it (2).
Why that should be when many other bakeries would happily make such a
cake should now be obvious. It would not
matter if 99 bakeries in a city would happily make a cake for such a wedding. As long as only one would not, that one would
be too much. If one man only refuses to
support same same “marriage” and stands on silence, that one man will be too
much and it will be for the same reason Henry VIII could not stand for Thomas
More’s silence. As Bolton’s Cromwell put
it, “silence can, in fact, speak--” sometimes too much for a guilty conscience
to bear.
(1).
Fulton Sheen, Life of Christ
(2).
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/05/31/economic-terrorism-bakery-that-refused-to-make-gay-couples-wedding-cake-gets-threats-could-close-down/
(3) See also the interesting article: http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/26/it-is-the-price-of-citizenship-an-elegy-for-religious-liberty-in-america/
(3) See also the interesting article: http://www.albertmohler.com/2013/08/26/it-is-the-price-of-citizenship-an-elegy-for-religious-liberty-in-america/
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