By Their Creator: How a Belief in a Creator Shapes the American Conscience

By Philip J. Eveland

Why did the Plymouth colonists succeed and the Jamestown colonists fail in those important early years of settlement? How did the Framers of the Constitution deal with slavery? What was the principle force behind those feelings? What drove the debate against slavery in antebellum America? To what authority did the civil rights of the 1950s and 1960s leaders appeal for equality? What is the ugly truth pro-abortionists don't want us to know? Did man really evolve from ape-like creatures? Is the Earth millions of years old? Is the Bible reliable?

The answers to each of these questions establishes your moral identity, defining how you view yourself and others. How our nationits governors, legislators, presidents, and judgesanswers these questions, and how it uses these fundamental principles in establishing our laws, lays the foundation of our national moral conscience. It is that moral conscience that has consistently driven this nation forward in achieving justice and equality. Today, though, that moral conscience is being corrupted by a sinister ideology. A principle that is utterly antithetical to the one that has compelled our leaders to the highest moral standards.

This book looks at that original principle and how it guided our leaders as they steered this nation safely through the rough waters of change. It looks, also, at how that great principle has been undermined, leaving us adrift in a turbulent sea of crisis. Mostly, though, it seeks to point us back to that great principle as the source of strength, courage, and honorcharacter traits sadly missing from many of todays leaders in American politics.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Dec 29, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469733937

Philip J. Eveland

Philip J. Eveland is a veteran of the US Navy’s submarine service and has been a defense analyst for more than fifteen years. He received a degree in diplomacy and military studies from Hawaii Pacific University and continued his graduate studies at Norwich University. Eveland currently lives in northern Virginia.

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All Rights Reserved © 2002 by Philip J Eveland

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Conclusion

Appendix A

Appendix B

End Notes

For my father, William Daniel Eveland (1920-1990), WWII veteran and tugboat captain.

Acknowledgments 

This book would never have been possible were it not for the support of my family and friends. I especially want to thank my sister, Robin Buttles, who compassionately took an anchorless and drifting ex-sailor into her home when he had no place to call home. I also want to thank my mom, Janice Connolly, and her husband, Harry Connolly, Jr., who endured ad infinitum my self-absorbed political tirades at the dinner table. I would also like to thank Lida and Stephanie Morgenroth, who took time out of their busy schedules to review and edit portions of my manuscript.

To my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, Who shed His blood for my sins, I give the highest thanks and praises.

Preface 

This second edition represents an almost complete rewrite of By Their Creator. For if ever a book needed a rewrite, it was the first edition. So complete were the errors in some areas, and so disjointed was the flow of the argument, that whole paragraphs were removed, and whole sections were moved and fitted together with others in order to make the thesis clearer and more understandable. The cut and paste feature of my word processor was put to much use.

The many problems and inaccuracies in the first edition are herein remedied. I make no excuses for the errors in fact, disordered thought- flow, use of unsubstantiated arguments, and other flaws in the first edition. I could, if I were so inclined, make the case that it was simply a poor effort because it was, after all, my first book. I could, if I were so inclined, argue that the inferiority of the first edition was due to my having written the book while working 40 hours a week (as a mall security guard) to pay the bills, while at the same time attending classes at the university. I could also, if I were so inclined, defend the poor quality of the first edition by pointing out that it was written, proofread, fact- checked, and edited by myself—something any professional editor will say is a no-no. I could argue all these things, if I were so inclined. However, I am not so inclined. So, therefore, I will accept full responsibility for the poor effort that was the first edition of By Their Creator.

I have chosen to rewrite the Introduction as well, to better represent the various changes made to the structure and argument of the thesis. With the added information and altered format the thesis has shifted more to an overall analysis of the role religion has played in science and politics specifically, in addition to how it has affected the conscience of the nation in general.

I think it is important also to discuss briefly the various factors that motivated a mall security guard to write a book about religion, science, and politics.

By Their Creator was inspired by a speech I heard by Dr. Alan Keyes given in December 1996 and aired on the radio in the winter of 1996-1997. I began immediately to view the world differently as a direct result of that speech, which was delivered to a gathering of physicians. That one speech completely altered my worldview and led me to a totally new interpretation of past events—both in the world overall and in my own personal life as well.

After my enlistment expired, and I was honorably discharged from the Navy in 1996, I moved into my sister’s basement and took a job as a security guard at a mall in a Baltimore, Maryland suburb. The job, while not nearly as exciting as submarine duty, did allow me a great deal of time to read. It also had me at the wheel of a truck patrolling a large parking lot late at night for many hours at a time. To stem boredom I began listening to AM radio; especially to a very preachy woman whose consistent nagging of her callers excited from me the occasional outburst of total agreement. That nagging host, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, the Queen of Radio, offered a completely new perspective on some very hot social issues—issues that I had never given much attention to prior to leaving the Navy.

However, it was another radio personality who really put the finishing touches on the worldview transformation occurring in my life those first few years out of the military. The lovable fuzz-ball, Rush Limbaugh—leader of the modern conservative movement, founder of the Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies, and overall Great American—made conservative ideals entertaining. While I was able to tolerate his occasional tangents on golf and cigars, I was also able to learn a great deal about the fundamental principles of conservatism—principles that I was coming to realize made a great deal of sense.

About this time I also read several books that completely altered my worldview as well: Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, Robert Bork’s Slouching Toward Gomorrah, and Marvin Lubenow’s Bones of Contention, just to name of few. All presented arguments that were completely alien to me. (I must note that subsequent investigations have reinforced their positions on each particular issue, and I have not been convinced otherwise—yet.) This book is a product of the new discoveries in intellectual thought I have been exposed to since leaving the navy, and it represents the new ideals I have come to embrace.

I offer this revised edition with much greater confidence than I did the first, and I expect and invite suggestions on how to better understand the difficult issues discussed below.

.P. J. E.

Summer, 2001

Introduction 

During one of her lectures a history professor commented negatively about Mel Gibson’s film, The Patriot. The film, released in 2000, was about a landed, but slave-less, American colonist whose life was drastically changed when he chose to defend his freedoms against the British during the American Revolutionary War. Good history, she said, offers a true analysis of the events of the past, and Gibson’s film was not good history. She denounced the film because it misrepresented the reality of what occurred during the American Revolution—that is, it omitted vital historical information and over-emphasized other, less-important elements of the American founding era. In short, it was a distortion of historical events.

I did not disagree with my professor’s academic assessment of Mel Gibson’s film—that is, as far as the accuracy goes in its portrayal of colonial-American history. True, it was poor history; but it was a film, after all. Every historian knows that popular history hardly ever stays true to historical reality. In fact, it could be argued that pop history, by its very nature, must distort the past to some degree in order to appeal to a wider audience. It is profit, after all, that drives the movie industry. However, what I found very interesting was that my history professor, while condemning The Patriot as poor history, included the play Inherit the Wind as required reading in a course on the history of American law.

For those who are unfamiliar with the play, which first appeared on Broadway in 1955, Inherit the Wind was very loosely based on the famous Scopes Trail of 1925, which was held in the small town of Dayton, Tennessee. Termed the Monkey Trail, it was heralded as the ultimate battle between science and religion. The fictionalized retelling of the tale on the stage nearly 30 years after the trial took place was intended to remind a McCarthy-era audience of the importance of freedom of thought in a democratic society. While entertaining, the play clearly painted a slanted picture of Bible-believing Christians, making them out to be what American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) attorney Clarence Darrow called bigots and ignoramuses.¹

The playwrights, Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, who clearly harbored a strong bias against Christians in the Bible Belt states, set out to display the citizens of an entire Appalachian town as bigots and ignoramuses. They included in the instructions to the director the following remarks: It is important to the concept of the play that the town is visible always, looming there, as much on trial as the individual defendant. The crowd is equally important throughout, so that the court becomes the cock-pit, an arena, with the active spectators on all sides of it.² In the 1999 film version of Inherit the Wind, starring Jack Lemmon and George C. Scott, the town is highly visible as well; more so than in either the play or in the first film adaptation (1960). The townspeople in that newest version are especially hostile toward Bertram Cates (the character representing biology teacher John T. Scopes) and Henry Drummond (the character representing ACLU attorney Clarence Darrow)—their hatred intensified so as to emphasize the mob mentality of Appalachian fundamentalist Christians; fundamentalists so overcome by their religious bigotry, so we are told, that nothing but odium spills forth from the parted lips of every citizen.

Especially hate-filled was the town’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Brown, whose daughter was the girlfriend of the evil-lutionist teacher who broke the law when he taught Darwin’s theory to his biology students. In one very telling scene, Reverend Brown leads the town in a prayer, [calling] down hell-fire on the man who...sinned against...[God’s] word. His fury finally erupts as he rabidly prays for God to strike down the sinner. The Reverend’s daughter is appalled and frightened, as are the many visitors who had come from all parts of the nation to see the trial of the century. The bloated, red-faced reverend then angrily asks God to make the evil teacher feel the terror of thy sword for all eternity, so that his soul will writhe in anguish and damnation.³ The people are whipped into a fury as the preacher even goes so far as to call down God’s wrath upon his own daughter!

Scenes like the above were (are) intended to do only one thing: stereotype religious fundamentalist as hate-filled zealots. This sort of propaganda about fundamentalist Christians, because it was so neatly wrapped in artful melodrama, further fed flames of distrust many intellectuals of the time were feeling toward people of faith. Thus, the distortions of fact in the play—and in the two films based on the play—were quite extensive, and their continued dissemination contributed substantially to further widening the rift between religiously oriented people and materialist academics. Even to the present the truth about the events that occurred in the courtroom in Dayton, Tennessee remains untold in any form of mainstream popular media. Considering the political views of most filmmakers in Hollywood, though, that reality will likely remain buried beneath the myth of Inherit the Wind.

The roots of those distortions put forward in the play and films can be traced directly to the work of journalist Frederick Lewis Allen, whose Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties represented the first popular telling of the trial six years after it occurred. More importantly, though, it acquainted the general population with an erroneous image of the people involved in the trial. According to Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, Edward J. Larson, Allen’s quasi-academic analysis presented the trial in cartoonlike simplicity, and thus grossly oversimplified matters. Larson also points out that Allen’s portrayals perpetuated various misconceptions about the trial and the people involved. Furthermore, Larson says that Allen based his final analysis of the trial on inaccurate news accounts and his own faulty memory. Also, because of the nature of Allen’s work (i.e. its popular format), Only Yesterday shaped the views of many lay readers, as well as many intellectuals, during the Great Depression and New Deal eras.⁴

Additionally, because of the prevalence of the book, Allen’s inaccurate account led later commentators to continue to advance inaccurate and harmful stereotypes of the people and events surrounding the trial of the century.⁵ Numerous other histories of the Scopes Trial followed Allen’s 1931 book, and all basically perpetuated his erroneous characterizations. More importantly, many of these histories, including school textbooks, wrongly stated that Scopes was arrested when he deliberately taught evolution to his class, and some completely deleted the role the ACLU played in the real story—i.e., that it was the ACLU that placed ads in local newspapers asking for volunteers to challenge the Tennessee law against teaching evolution, and that Scopes was talked into the whole situation by a local businessman hoping to stir up controversy, thus putting the town on the map. Scopes was never arrested, and he never spent a day in jail. In fact, the law called for a fine of no more than $200. However, these facts were never mentioned in subsequent histories.⁶ Larson argues further that those myths helped promote an anti-religious culture in American universities, courtrooms, and especially in Hollywood.⁷ A culture that is alive and well even today.

The subsequent and repetitive characterization of conservatives— especially Christian conservatives—as bigots and ignoramuses abated somewhat in the 1940’s. However, in the years after WWII, and with a booming economy, crowds flocked to the movies to spend their ever- increasing disposable incomes. In the late fifties and early sixties the trend returned full-force with films such as Elmer Gantry, which starred Jean Simmons as a saintly evangelist who preaches prohibition, and Burt Lancaster as a charlatan holy man who takes advantage of the over-zealous and faithful followers. The film again presented the typified image of religious zealots and their gullible supporters. Again audiences in thousands of packed movie houses were treated to Allen’s grossly oversimplified and cartoonlike images of Christians. Additionally, televisions began appearing in living rooms all across the nation, replacing radio as the primary source of entertainment for millions of American families. Together, film and television helped to prolong the myths about religious people which began back in the 1930’s with a deceptive retelling of the Scopes Trial in inaccurate historical books and articles.

By the 1950’s, with government officials routinely summoning citizens before a senatorial committee’s dais for televised interrogations into their political beliefs, many of America’s intellectual elites responded by manufacturing caricatures of what they viewed as the enemy: God-fearing Americans. Because Communism was founded upon an atheistic belief- system, and democratic republicanism was founded upon Christian ideals, very often that dichotomy of fundamental principles in political ideologies was exploited in order to gain much-needed public support for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s investigations. And so, in response, radical liberals began their counterattack in kind.

While university lecture halls often echoed with rhetoric sympathetic to the Communist cause, the greater mainstream audience remained, for the most part, unreachable to left-leaning intellectuals. Even the play version of Inherit the Wind was not a capable tool in this respect, as legitimate theater remained primarily the dominion of affluent Americans. After it moved from stage to film in 1960, however, a wholly fabricated, negative image ofBible-believing Christians reached a considerably larger audience in movie theaters than did the play. The emerging counter-culture of the 1960’s eagerly embraced that characterization of fundamentalist Christians, reinforcing the stigma of all religiously-minded people as charlatans, anti-intellectuals, or outright ignoramuses.

The rebellious youth movement, who were typically the children of the relatively affluent, maintained a very powerful influence on the media—especially commercial media such as film and television. Disposable income among American teens was skyrocketing, and by the late sixties it was the youth of America that was calling the shots on what films and television shows studio executives produced. Appealing to this new generation of consumers television shows began exploiting those perceptions of Christians common among the anti-theistic elites teaching at American universities. These elitists, whose opinions of Christians echoed those of Allen, Lawrence, and Lee, had previously been limited to university lecture halls. Through television and film those perceptions fast became the consensus among a greater number of Americans. Thus, characters like Archie Bunker simply helped protract the growing impression that the older generation was foul, repressive, and oppressive. Archie’s tirades about women and minorities were broadcast into the homes of millions of viewers, and in several episodes Archie even misused the Bible in defense of his bigotry—much like defenders of slavery had done a century before. The young and rebellious baby-boomer generation—the Civil Rights and Vietnam dramas still vivid in their memory—was the target audience, and they accepted easily the portrayal of their parent’s generation as backward and ignorant. CBS’s All in the Family sat atop the Nielson ratings for years. (More recently, characters like Ned Flanders, the goody-goody Christian neighbor of the cartoon family the Simpsons, have further contributed to the stereotype of Christians as hypocritical and self- righteous—not to mention aggravatingly sunny and upbeat.)

Also, increases in university attendance after the passage of the GI Bill and other education programs allowed a greater number of American teens to attend college in the 1950’s and onward. Therefore substantially more baby-boomers were exposed to the anti-Christian opinions of academic elitists than were the Depression-era genera- tion.⁸ As a result, today many of the executives in charge of television and motion picture studios and news media outlets are a byproduct of that anti-Christian prejudice. Prime-time television programs, films, newspapers, and the evening news therefore clearly reflect the old-line anti-Christian bias that emerged to dominate the views of the faculty on university campuses three and four decades ago.

Take, for instance, a Washington Post article which appeared February 1, 1993. Michael Weisskopf, the article’s author, wrote that members of the Christian Right are largely poor, uneducated and easy to command.⁹ Subsequent research revealed that Weisskopf’s assertion was completely false, and the paper printed a correction the next day, stating that There is no factual basis for the author’s comments. Weisskopf simply intended to inform (warn?) readers about the ability of the religious right to mobilize its masses, or flocks, and to ignite a grass-roots firestorm¹⁰—particularly, that is, during the first months of the Clinton administration.

When Bill Clinton offered a proposal to remove a ban on homosexuals in the military, it was the Christian Coalition that led the fight to preserve the ban, and it was the Christian Coalition’s actions that led Weisskopf to reaffirm the old stereotype—just in case anyone had forgotten how obtuse fundamentalists were.

Less than a week after the Post ran Weisskopf’s article, conservative columnist Howard Kurtz noted that the Post had been flooded with phone calls from angry evangelicals responding to Weisskopf’s insidious comments.¹¹ Kurtz also pointed out that Weisskopf had obtained his information about the economic and educational status of the members of the religious right from several experts, but had failed to cite those experts in the article. Weisskopf, though, offered a defense of his position, stating that he believed religious conservatives were poor, uneducated and easy to command because it was a universally accepted fact, and therefore no authority for the claim was necessary. Weisskopf was, after all, simply presenting a fact to his readers that existed only in the minds of Washington, D.C. intellectuals, but which had been in place for over sixty years in academe. Today the fact that conservative Christians are bigots and ignoramuses, as Darrow once called them, has become an unquestioned icon chiseled into the conscience of academe—a universally accepted fact.

This may well explain why, in the midst of a discussion about the Scopes Trial, a fellow student asked our history professor why fundamentalists are so uneducated and always seem to be from areas of the country that are largely poor. The professor, without missing a beat, simply shrugged and stated she didn’t know, revealing quite a bit about the current state of ignorance existing on college campuses concerning fundamentalist Christians.

My Purpose

In the pages that follow, I will attempt to address the ignorance about Bible-believing Christians that seems to be so prevalent today. To do so, a large portion of the book will be dedicated to discussing Darwinism, for it is without a doubt the theory of evolution that has been the greatest tool humanists and atheists have used in their attempts to undermine the truth of the Bible. When Thomas Jefferson penned the words which are the title of this book (We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, BY THEIR CREATOR, with certain unalienable rights...), he was pointing future generations toward a path of justice and equality based not upon human will, but rather upon the principle that all humans, regardless of their wealth or station, are subject and must answer to an authority higher than themselves. And it was through the appeals to that very principle that slavery was abolished, civil rights were instituted, and women were afforded political equality with men.

As Americans venture into the next millennium, and as the nation continues to address social injustices, there has emerged a growing and vocal cadre of anti-religious Americans who intend to remove from the culture all vestiges of God and a belief in God. Many of these people do this, I believe, out of an ignorance of the crucial role religion has played in American history; many simply do so out of sheer hostility toward religious people. In either case, they continue to dismantle the wall that separates unadulterated hedonism and pursuit of power from temperance and humility, without knowing full-well why the Founders erected that wall in the first place. And with each passing generation Americans see more and more the results of the displacement of a national conscience sensitive to the great principle expressed in the Declaration of Independence. And as a result, an illness has infected the culture.

It is without question that America is indeed sick; the sickness manifesting itself in the thousands of young who take their own lives, in the prevalence of sex and violence in the public square (television, movies and music), in the outrageous number of out-of-wedlock births, and in the cynicism of the general public regarding national institutions. The purpose of this book, then, is to examine the nation during periods in its history when it overcame some similar illness that infected the American culture; and also during times in which that illness began to undermine the basic principles of the Founding. While the undermining of those fundamental principles manifests itself in some form of injustice or oppression, an examination of those past events of injustice and oppression may point to a proven cure of the illness currently ailing the nation.

By examining and understanding the illness, it is my hope that we can find our identity, and even our purpose as a nation. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. who said redemption can only come through a humble acknowledgment of guilt and an honest knowledge of self.¹² So, in the style of a John Bradshaw, we will delve deep into the recesses of our memory; back to when the nation was but a developing fetus in the womb of a new continent. We will examine the nutrients that fed this young nation, the ideological provisions that nourished its growth and strengthened its resolve, and ultimately supplied us with a source of truth by which we could overcome the many instances of injustice that have plagued every society since the dawn of man.

Key to the argument made here is that the nation’s uniqueness among all others is based on the fact that it was founded upon the principles found in the Christian Bible, unlike any nation before or since. In order to better understand our uniqueness as a nation we must take a look at the world from which it emerged. We will briefly examine Great Britain and its laws in order to give an overview ofhow the world’s most civilized nation of the seventeenth century functioned legally; a look at its conscience, so to speak.

Additionally, the thread of Christianity and its ideals, going back to the early development of English law, will clearly illustrate and establish the conservative nature of the nation’s birth, and point to the original direction in which the nation was headed and from which today we are drifting away. Despite modern liberal interpretations of the founding and other events of our past, these facts of our origins will dispel the myth of their liberal, enlightenment nature by demonstrating that every moment in the nation’s history where justice and equality were sought was indeed a move toward the truth expressed in the Judeo-Christian Bible; a return to the principle expressed in the Declaration of Independence; an appeal to the source of our rights—the very Creator who endowed us with such rights.

While there are numerous occasions in which to examine, from the nation’s conception to birth to present, we will focus on four watershed moments: the move of Europeans into the colonial settlements of Jamestown and Plymouth (our conception); the political separation from England and the Founding (our birth); the antebellum period and how we dealt with slavery during the Civil War (our childhood); and the Civil Rights movement of the 1950’s and 1960’s (a midlife crisis, so to speak).

Another topic of concern is that of Darwinism—specifically, naturalism. Because our system of government is based upon the principle that human beings were created, and thus derive our rights from the Creator, the assault on that principle by naturalistic atheism will be addressed as well. Several chapters will examine the philosophical origins of Darwin’s theory, and the argument will be made that the modern scientific theory of evolution is nothing more than ancient pagan religious beliefs repackaged in naturalism and atheism, and, furthermore, presented to the public as objective science. The argument will be presented from the perspective of what has been termed young earth creationism—that is, that the universe was created by God about six thousand years ago.

1 

The Delicate Milk

In this chapter, we will briefly trace the history of the nation from which the character of America emerged—i.e., Great Britain. In order to understand the true impact Christianity had in righting wrongs, obliging men to be kind one to another, and even compelling kings to yield to an authority greater than themselves, we must take a look at Britain, the nation from which the founder’s came. That is, we must examine the laws of that nation, and the principles upon which those laws were established.

Great Britain, America’s Mother, has a relatively long history, dating back to before the sixth century A.D. and the tales of King Arthur, Excalibur, and the Knights of the Round Table. As a territory of the Roman Empire, England was during the third and fourth centuries a developing outpost for Caesar and his expanding empire. It was protected from invasion from the north by Hadrian’s Wall, a seventy-three mile barrier stretching from the west coast to the east coast of the island—literally cutting the island in half. The wall was built by one of Rome’s Five Good Emperors, and it was maintained primarily by locals under the rule of Roman forces.

The British considered themselves full members and citizens of Rome, and even prided themselves in their role in the empire. However, by the fifth century, with the Roman Empire in decline and withdrawing within itself, the Germanic tribes of the Angles and Saxons moved in from the European continent to divide the island into several small kingdoms. Soon thereafter, the Scots and Picts descended from the north to take up residence among the Germanic people, dividing what remained into additional small empires.

Primitive laws were brought to the island from the continent thus replacing already established Roman law. These new rules were largely based upon principles derived from a conglomeration of the barbarous practices of the Saxons, and the remnants of the laws of the British Christian Church, which had been forced to the western shores of the island by invading forces where it survived, barely, in small villages. It was from this small spattering of Christianity that St. Patrick emerged to ultimately Christianize the island.

Because Britain experienced centuries of invasion from Viking Danes, Swedes, and Norwegians, the various kingdoms fluctuated in size and power, some disappearing altogether. Laws, therefore, fluctuated as well. Christianity continued to charm the invading barbarians, though, holding at bay their baser passions for violence;¹ at least to some extent, that is. A twisted law emerged from the melting pot of philosophies in the British Isles. Predominant among these was a form of divine intervention. Under this philosophy of law an all-powerful and all-knowing God allowed only those individuals truly guilty of a crime to be found so by the courts. The accused vowed an oath, and with the support of oathhelpers, was found either guilty or innocent. A key element in the determination of guilt or innocence was a process called an ordeal. By subjecting themselves to physical trials, such as holding red-hot irons, pulling objects from pots of boiling water, or being plunged in a pool of water,² a person could prove their innocence by suffering the natural consequences of the ordeal (e.g. severe burns, etc.). In most cases the ordeal resulted in death as it was assumed that if they were indeed innocent, then God would protect them.³

Another form of justice was trial by battle, a remnant of a Norman idea in which it was believed that the God of Battles [would] strengthen the arm of the righteous.⁴ This led to the practice of powerful entities (including the Church) employing well-trained warriors to engage in battles for justice, while the poor were left to defend themselves against these battle-hardened opponents.

Slaves and Women

With Christianity would come a new system of justice, though, and the systems of the ordeal and trial by battle as means of achieving justice soon