A Spiritual Heritage Tour of the United States by David Barton
In addition to these eight pictures, several statues of America’s heroes and statesmen line the walls of the Rotunda. Each of the fifty States is allowed to display two statues of individuals from that State within the Capitol. (There are also five to ten other statues here, depending on various displays at any given time.) So, if an individual is commemorated by a statue in the Capitol, it is indeed a great honor – very few individuals from across America’s long history have ever been accorded this distinction.
Most of the statues began arriving at the Capitol in 1870 and are found primarily in four rooms: the Rotunda, East Central Hall, the Hall of Columns, and National Statuary Hall (refer to Appendix A). Although the statues are occasionally shuffled around to different locations within the Capitol or sometimes replaced by a different statue from the State (as in the case of an astronaut from Colorado), such changes do not happen often. For the most part, the statues are generally of earlier leaders and statesmen and generally remain in the same area.
Many of the statues and paintings within the Capitol will be highlighted as individual rooms are examined. Let’s start, however, by focusing our attention on the events depicted in the eight paintings in the Rotunda, beginning with the Embarkation of the Pilgrims in 1620. The Pilgrims are kneeling in prayer, committing their endeavor to God. Notice especially the Bible in the center of the picture around which they are gathered. That Bible is a “Geneva Bible.”
The Geneva Bible (140 editions were printed from 1560 to 1644 1) was the favorite of those who were called Pilgrims, Separatists, Dissenters, and Puritans. These groups believed that there was much corruption in the organized church Of the sixteenth century and that many of the church’s practices had become anti-Biblical; they objected to those corrupt practices (hence the title “Dissenters”). Some “dissenters” dedicated themselves completely unto God and separated themselves from the church and its objectionable practices (and consequently were called “Separatists”) while other “dissenters” sought to cleanse and purify the church from within (and thus were called “Puritans”).
The Geneva Bible was the Bible that the early religious colonists (often called “Pilgrims”) brought to America’s shores. This Bible, despite its size of nearly 6 inches by 8 inches, was called a “pocket” Bible. (Previous editions of the Bible were huge and unwieldy, some being over two feet in height!) Many of the earlier Bibles were termed “Pulpit Bibles” because they were, in fact, often chained to the pulpits of churches. However, with the Geneva Bible, a person could individually possess and also read the Word of God without having to rely on a king or church official to interpret what the Bible said.
The most unique feature of the Geneva Bible – and the feature which so impacted American culture – was its marginal commentaries. These commentaries were largely the work of reformers who had been driven from Great Britain during the reigns of Bloody Mary and James I – two monarchs who were advocates of the Divine Right of Kings and of the authority of the State over the Church. The commentaries in the Geneva Bible reflected reformation thought and took an anti-autocratic tone toward both church leaders and state leaders.
With such open criticism of church and state leaders, the Pilgrims became the target of harsh religious and government persecution. Seeking a place where they could serve God according to their interpretation of the Scriptures, the Pilgrims arrived in America in November 1620. While still anchored offshore, the Pilgrims established the “Mayflower Compact” – the first government document written on this continent.
The “Mayflower Compact” articulated two important Biblical principles emphasized in the Geneva commentaries. The first was that of evangelization, and thus the Pilgrims declared that they had come to this continent for the express purpose of evangelizing the nation to a knowledge of Jesus Christ. The second religious principle in that document was what is now termed social compact – that individuals knit themselves together into a community which would then govern itself under fixed standards. In the case of the Pilgrims, their fixed standards were those established in God’s Word.