FIVE SMOOTH STONES - The Five Ascension Gifts in the Heavenly Shepherds Bag

FIVE SMOOTH STONES — The Five Ascension Gifts in the Heavenly Shepherd’s Bag

a visionary and almost evangelistic in his beliefs and zeal for resting most of the power in the hands of the citizens, Hamilton was, on the other hand, much more suspect of the citizenry. He felt the need for centralized control in order to facilitate harmony within the new nation. However, due to his desire for security for the people of the nation, he was able to institute a national banking system including a mint, which made it economically possible for the nation to survive. Hamilton’s quest for order was seen as too controlling to Jefferson who listed liberty as the greatest essential. However, what Jefferson saw as liberty was seen as licentious and quite dangerous to Hamilton. Taken as two individuals these men represented doctrinal extremes. Without the balance brought in by George Washington it is doubtful whether these two men would have willingly been placed together, each being suspect of the other and each of them having serious questions concerning the others opinion on how the nation should be managed. In these three men we can symbolically see an example of the five ministry gifts of the apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher. Jefferson has been called the prophet of American independence, and was as zealous as any evangelist in this proclamation of the rights of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Later he was criticized for buying what was known as the Louisiana Purchase from Napoleon. However, in one move he doubled the size of the United States, and with prophetic proclamation wrote that there was land “with room enough for our descendants to the thousandth and thousandth generation.” Hamilton on the other hand was very suspect of the general population as a whole. He doubted their ability to watch out for their own needs and felt that their selfish personal desires would be put over the needs of the nation as a whole thereby weakening the union for everyone. He was a proponent of control being exercised over the people for their own good. Like a shepherd, he felt the people needed to be cared for as they, for the most part, could not look after themselves.

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