People were beginning to talk about the Colonies becoming independent from Great Britain. Unfair treatment of the colonists without giving them any representation in the British body which deliberated the laws, caused many to rebel, rise up, take to the streets, and, yes revolt.

The colonies sent leaders to represent them in a Continental Congress at Philadelphia. At the 2^nd Continental Congress the representatives decided to put independence to a vote. A committee was formed to draft a Declaration of Independence should one be necessary. That committee was Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Roger Sherman, Robert Livingston, and a young lawyer named Thomas Jefferson, who was chosen to write the first draft of such a document.

That draft included the words: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one People to dissolve the Political Bands which have connected them with one another, and to assume among the Powers of the Earth, the separate and equal Station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, . . .”

So when I was reading that book I told you about before, by C.S. Lewis, “Mere Christianity”, what he said at one point jumped out at me. I thought you might be interested in this quote:

“Now this Law or Rule about Right and Wrong used to be called the Law of Nature. Nowadays, when we talk of the ‘laws of nature’ we usually mean things like gravitation, or heredity, or the laws of chemistry. But when the older thinkers called the Law of Right and Wrong ‘the Law of Nature’, they really meant the Law of Human Nature. The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had this law—with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or disobey it.

“We may put this another way. Each man is at every moment subjected to several different sets of law but there is only one of these which he is free to disobey.”

Then Lewis goes on to say “This law is called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught it.” (Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis, 1952, pages 4-5).

Perhaps he was mistaken. Maybe we do need to be taught the Laws of Nature after all!