In December 1883, a man by the name of Stephen Girard died willing his estate to the City of Philadelphia. A controversial clauses of Girard's will established a college for impoverished white male orphans between the ages of six and ten years. The will specified the subject matter to be taught, limiting instruction to purely moral concepts of goodness, truth, and honor, and barring clergymen of any denomination from holding any post within the college and from visiting the premises. Some religious groups sued and the case went to the Supreme Court. The court was put to the task of deciding if keeping out denominational groups was the same as keep out Christianity and the Bible. The court ruled that the will was valid but while the denominational groups could be kept out, the Bible and Christianity could not. They said, “Are not these truths all taught by Christianity, although it teaches much more? Where can the purest principles of morality be learned so clearly or so perfectly as from the New Testament? Where are benevolence, the love of truth, sobriety, and industry so powerfully and irresistibly inculcated as in the sacred volume?” They knew that for any instruction in morality, the Word of God is the superior text! It is a shame that this view of the word of God has changed not only in our country but even in some churches. That is why the true church focuses on teaching the Bible and the Bible only. It has “granted to us everything pertaining to life and godliness”
Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so. Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English. Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome. Wouldn’t you feel good? You shouldn’t. As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590. You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with. Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
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