Remembering Elias Boudinot
Khen Lim
Elias Boudinot (Image source: artmuseum.princeton.edu)
Most people these days won’t know of an Elias Boudinot who
served the United States as a president. Many might not even know how to correctly
pronounce his name. Yet on November 4 1782, Boudinot was elected President of
Congress and then in 1795, George Washington made him Director of the U.S.
Mint. Some might remember that as president, he signed the Treaty of Paris that
ended the Revolutionary War with England but it is on the Christian historical
calendar that he made an even more tremendous impact and an indelible mark.
Boudinot attended law at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton
Uni) before becoming a legal apprentice under the mentorship of Richard
Stockton who went on to marry his elder sister, Annis, and becoming a signatory
of the Declaration of Independence. He in turn married Stockton’s younger sister,
Hannah, in 1762. In his later years, Boudinot made a fortune from his land
investments, owning huge tracts in Ohio including what is today Cincinnati. His
law practice also prospered and he played many important parts in America’s
revolution against the British, not only supporting rebel spies and promoting
enlistment but also helping to fund the purchase of war supplies and fulfilling
his role as commissary general for prisoners.
In 1777, in recognition of his commitments as a Patriot, the
New Jersey legislature included Boudinot in their delegation to the Continental
Congress upon the recommendation of his neighbourhood but because of his
commissary work, his role in Congress was delayed until the following year.
After the Revolutionary War was over, Boudinot returned to
represent New Jersey in the U.S. House of Representatives and then took up his
appointment as director of the U.S. Mint under Presidents
Washington, Adam and Jefferson.
President Washington's Thanksgiving proclamation in December 1777 (Image source: potus-geeks.livejournal.com)
However it was not his political life that Boudinot is best
remembered for. His works for Christ were even more compelling. In September
1789, it was he who proposed that the House and Senate together request
President Washington to proclaim a day of Thanksgiving for ‘the many signal
favours of Almighty God,’ saying:
“I could not think of letting the session pass over without
offering an opportunity to all the citizens of the United States of joining,
with one voice, in returning to Almighty God their sincere thanks for the many
blessings He had poured down upon them.”
As a devout Presbyterian, Boudinot lent his name to missions
and missionary works. He also served as one of the trustees of his alma mater,
the College of New Jersey for almost fifty years wherein clergymen were trained
to serve. There too, he helped to found the Department of Natural Sciences but
even so, he was more concerned about teaching the resurrection of Christ to
students.
The Age of Revelation (left) and The Age of Reason (right) respectively by Elias Boudinot and Thomas Paine (Image sources: olivercowdery.com and study.com)
Boudinot’s avid study of Scripture equipped him enough to
respond to English and American political activist Thomas Paine’s bestselling The Age of Reason* in 1790 by countering
with The Age of Revelation.** Boudinot
believed that it was Paine’s popularity with his earlier 1776 publication
‘Common Sense’ that brought wide readership to The Age of Reason in which he
asserted that the Bible was more ‘the word of a demon than the word of God’
being ‘a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalise
mankind.’ It was when ‘thousands of copies of The Age of Reason had been sold
at public,’ that Boudinot decided that it deserved a stern counter-response.
However Boudinot took a bit of time before he responded to
Paine. In that time, he deliberated over his approach and in the end, in reply
to Paine’s scholarship style, he adopted a contemplative approach that was
filled with thought and humility. Boudinot harboured great fear when it came to
Paine’s work and he correctly surmised the very type of problems we are all
facing today particularly in America.
“I confess that I was much mortified to find, the whole force
of this vain man’s genius and art, pointed at the youth of America and her
unlearned citizens. Even though there are tens of thousands of churches and
tens of millions of Christians, it seems that the scepticism of Paine has the
upper hand. The prevalence of scepticism is more the inaction of Christians
than the accomplishment of sceptics,” he wrote with haunting prophecy.
Paine’s book The Age of Reason was a dramatic turnaround from
his earlier ‘Common Sense.’ In the earlier book, he proposed using Scripture to
make the case that Americans reserved the biblical right to oppose tyranny. It
is something that today’s liberals conveniently sidestep and instead they focus
on The Age of Reason as the very work that Paine used to prove that America was
not founded on the Christian faith but rather on Enlightenment principles.
The impact was almost immediate. Paine’s friends admonished
him. John Adams labelled him a ‘blackguard’ for writing from the plumbed depths
of ‘a malignant heart.’ One-time strong advocate, George Washington, tore at
his principles at his farewell address, calling them unpatriotic and
subversive.
Paine used The Age of Reason to attack Christians, viewing the
Church as corrupt and criticising its efforts to gain political presence. In
place of revelation, he proposes the use of reasoning, which then meant that he
not only rejected divine miracles but also that he considered the Bible to be
‘an ordinary piece of literature rather than as a divinely inspired text.’
Many attributed the proliferation of freethinkers to Paine’s
book, The Age of Reason. Because the book was inexpensively put together, it
had far and wide reach of the public and because of its popularity, the English
government at that time banned its publishing and distribution by threatening
to prosecute printers and booksellers alike.
In The Age of Revelation, Boudinot’s keen sense of the Bible
plus his power of logic and analytical skills coupled to a very wide field of
knowledge and languages that included Latin and Greek permeates his argument
against Paine. His writing showed up a once-respected writer who had wilfully
tarnished his own reputation by railing against a religion that he either had
no clear understanding of or had no desire to want to.
As of this time of writing, American Vision has a special sale
price on Boudinot’s The Age of Revelation. You may access the page by clicking
here or copying this link: http://store.americanvision.org/products/the-age-of-revelation-the-age-of-reason-shewn-to-be-an-age-of-infidelity.
Fourth President of the United States in Congress Assembled by the U.S. Mint & Coins Act 1782-1792 (Image source: eliasboudinot.com)
Boudinot’s advocacy of the rights of the American Indians was
also well documented. Although he wrongly asserted that they were the ten lost
tribes of Israel (DNA studies disproved it), his heart was well placed as
evidenced by a book he wrote about it, called ‘A Star in the West’ as well as
the extent of his efforts in getting them educated.
American Bible Society's former iconic Manhattan head office before moving to Philadelphia (Image source: christianitytoday.com)
And part of this initiative was Boudinot’s desire to make the
Bible as reachable as possible by more people than was once thought possible.
In 1816, he pushed for and co-founded the American Bible Society in which, as its
inaugural president, he gave away $10,000 to help fund the push. In a day where
the annual income is around $400, that was a huge amount of money.
Boudinot’s political prominence might not be much to write
home about for those who don’t know who he is but his work with the Bible
Society is. It was the Bible Society that placed the first Bibles in hotels and
produced pocket Bibles for soldiers during the American Civil War. Their first
translation was in 1818 into Lenape, a Native American language. By 1898, the Bible
Society had begun selling in China as well.
The American Bible Society isn’t just alive but it is also the
catalyst behind many of the modern translations of the Bible and their
distribution globally.
All thanks to Elias Boudinot.
* Full name is The
Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology
** Full name is The
Age of Revelation: The Age of Reason Shewen to be An Age of Infidelity
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