1.4—Good Quotes & Our Roadmap (11 min video)

Transcript

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Well, in this fourth lecture of the first lesson, I want to go over some of the quotes that you have in your reader. And I want to take some time to explain these. After all, you’re going to be writing a kind of like little essay on one of these quotes, or more than one if you like. But let me explain to you some of these quotes and why I have them in here. Now the first one, I could take in from Proverbs, so I have the author here, Solomon, who said, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” Now that really is the foundation of any subject or any discipline you’re going to study, whether it be history, whether it be drawing, whether it be biology or algebra, etc. The fear of the Lord is always going to be the beginning of wisdom in any of those disciplines. That’s because the fear of the Lord teaches us who He actually is. It teaches us that He is a holy God, that He is holy other than us, that before anything was made, before any space was created, before any time was created, there was simply God.

It wasn’t like He was somewhere or He was in some time, because those things weren’t made. There was simply Him. And so all of those things should cause us to pause. All of those things should cause us to stop, to be still, and to know that God is God. And so history, like many other disciplines, should teach us that. The second quote I have on here is by Francis Bacon, who said, “Crafty men condemn studies, simple men admire them, and wise men use them.” That’s a brilliant idea to help for any discipline that you’re studying. Now, first of all, as crafty men condemn studies, that means that evil men, men who are up to no good, men who are mischievous.

They will always condemn or completely dismiss school because they don’t like the idea of wisdom. Because wisdom will expose them for who they are. Wisdom will expose evil and wish to attack evil. Simple men, though, admire studies. This often is a category that many of us fall into because often when we come across someone who knows a lot, or we come across someone who seems to be what we would call smart or intelligent, we often think, “Oh wow, aren’t they smart and intelligent? Geez, I think I’ll think about that for a moment and then go back to my video game.” In other words, we hardly ever realize that when we come across someone who has wisdom, we hardly ever think to ourselves, “How can I build upon what they have given? How can I actually become like them? How can I actually imitate them and in some way continue the work they have already done?” That really is the vision that we should have when we approach someone who knows something. When we approach someone who actually has something to pass on and to give to us. Because wise men use studies. Wise men actually apply the lessons they have been taught to real life. You need to be pursuing that this year. All the principles I give you, all the stories I teach you, these things should change the way that you are. They should change not just how you are as a student, whether or not you’re diligent, They should change how you treat your siblings. They should change how you treat your parents. They should change how you actually spend your time throughout the day. Not because I’m going to tell you how to do those things, but because the principles of the past, the great heroes of the past, they should somehow encourage you to be better.

They should somehow encourage you that by loving God, you actually want to follow His law. Another quote that I have on here is by Tolkien. He said, “Education ought to be little more than a form of intellectual repentance. If it is more than that or less than that, horrors result.” In other words, in all studies, in all aspects of education, not just history, it always teaches us to repent. It always teaches us that there are things we don’t know. There are things that we don’t understand. There are subjects right now probably that you are taking or aspects of those subjects that you don’t quite get. But I hope that you know that through diligent practice, and especially if you can seek out someone who knows it better than you and you can confess to them, “I don’t understand this.” Then you will have the ability to begin to understand those things. In other words, all of education is constantly reminding us that we have to be humble. history specifically reminds us that all the mistakes of the past we could easily commit. We often like to think, “Well, if I was there, I never would have done that.” Problem is, is that if we were there, we probably would have done the exact same thing. We probably would have been in the crowd shouting, “Crucify him!” when Christ was up for the decision of whether or not to die. Because we often go along with the crowd around us. We often go along with the people around us, and we We often don’t like to stand up for what is virtuous, for what is true. Another quote that I have on here is by Richard Weaver, who said, “Those who have no concern for their ancestors will, by simple application of the same rule, have none for their descendants.” Here we come actually to an exact reason for why we say the past. That is of course that if you don’t care about the people who came before you, those who have been your grandparents or your great grandparents or those people who are distantly related to you or those people who you have no idea how you’re related to because they lived so long ago. If you care nothing about them, it really teaches you to only care about yourself. And if you apply that same logic, you’re not going to really care about the people around you and specifically, you’re not going to care about the people who come after you. Now of course, most of us, just from family ties, love our grandparents and we’ll love our children. But the truth is that what Weaver is talking about is really talking about something beyond that. He’s talking about the people you’re related to who you never knew but you need to know because they explain who you are. They explain the kind of person you are. And they have a lot to teach you even from the grave about being faithful or about being virtuous or about working hard. Because if you have that vision which you so desperately need, not only will you be able to provide vision for your children, but you’ll be able to provide vision for your grandchildren, your great-grandchildren, and so on and so on and so on. That’s because it takes a vision of all the years that have come before to have a vision for the years to come. See, if we really want to change the world for the better, we’re not going to do it in a single lifetime. We actually have to have a vision that goes beyond our own life, that goes many years, 500 years into the future, but that requires having a vision that is also rooted at least 500 years in the past.

Yet other quotes that I have on here, and I don’t of course have time to do all of them, I’ll look at this one by Hilaire Belloc. Time after time, mankind is driven against the rocks of the horrid reality of a fallen creation. And time after time, mankind must learn the hard lessons of history. The lessons that for some dangerous and awful reason we can’t seem to keep in our collective memory. In other words, history is going to be a tale of how fallen the world is. Of how we seem to make the same mistakes over and over and over again. But of course, what that really should point to is it should point to the cross. It should really point to the whole idea and the whole reality of redemption. That no matter how often we make these stupid, boneheaded mistakes, somehow there is still mercy, somehow there is still grace at the end of it, because God promised it from the very beginning.

And then of course we have this quote here at the very end by Edmund Burke, who said, “They will never love where they ought to love, who do not hate where they ought to hate.” Let me explain that to you. What’s interesting about that is that if you want to love things properly, you want to love truth, beauty, and goodness. You want to love what God loves. You also have to be willing to hate what he hates. You have to be willing to hate sin itself. You have to be willing to hate evil itself. So history should teach us to not only pursue the things that are right, but to also attack the things that are wrong. One of the great things we learn about heroes is they were willing to risk their lives, risk their livelihoods, risk whatever it is that they had been given in order to often attack what they saw as a gross injustice, what they saw as real evil.

That’s often how we define a hero. In fact, that’s how all of our stories go. Now before I end this lecture here, I want to take a moment to look at the table of contents, show you where we’re going to actually go this semester as well as the second semester. And you’ll see this actually in your reader. You can see where we’re going to go. In fact, you already had this assignment to look at it. But we’re going to be beginning, we’re We’re going to be starting our series of American studies with the Mesoamericans. We’re going to be taking a long time in beginnings. You’re going to see that we’re going to talk about explorers, we’re going to talk about colonies, reformational colonies, the Puritans, the Wars of Control, the Great Awakening, and some of the early founding fathers, men like Sam Adams or Benjamin Franklin.

Now in typical history courses, you wouldn’t spend nearly that much time studying those beginnings. Most history courses kind of fly over that territory really quickly, and they get right to 1776, they then fly real fast to the Civil War and stay there for a little bit and then maybe they fly to the 20th century.

That’s because most Christian courses, I’m sorry, most American history courses do not have a Christian worldview. They don’t actually look at American history as being something always tied to the faith in some way or another. And so they often want to skip over those sections and just talk about, say, the wars, Or just talk about the time when the government became kind of this big salvific thing and tried to save everyone through welfare or through Social Security or whatever it might actually be.

But we’re not going to take that approach. We’re going to take our time in beginnings. We’re going to take our time in the beliefs and the motivations of those who came before us. So we will of course talk about the Declaration of Independence. We will talk about the War of Independence and the Constitution. We’ll take our time, though, after that in what happened in America and how America changed and how America formed in between the War of Independence and the Civil War.

And in fact, the Civil War will be one of the final things we talk about, along with Reconstruction, the changes that came after, and men like Booker T.

Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, which we’ll get to in the second semester. The reason why we’re taking our time is I really want you to understand how ideas, how faith actually forms a culture. It’s not simply formed by events, it’s not simply formed by how much money someone has, it’s not even formed by wars. It’s always formed about what you believe at your very core. That’s why we’re taking our time throughout these beginnings.