Thought for the Eve of Election Day

Like many Americans, I have found the campaigning for tomorrow’s mid-term elections sickening. I would like to be able to say that it is the Republicans who have been deceptive in their advertising, but the Democrats have been equally dishonest. Some Democrats have even sounded like Republicans, touting how they have voted consistently against bills supported by the Obama administration. It is nonetheless clear that, although the Democrats may not take us boldly into the twenty-first century, the Republican are surely determined to return us to the nineteenth. I don’t wish to go there.

Voting tomorrow will be easy. I have had no incentive to agonize over whom I will vote for; if Jack the Ripper is running as a Democrat, I will vote for him over any Republican.

While doing some work in support of The Episcopal Church, I came upon a perfect quotation apropos of tomorrow’s elections. It comes from the quintessentially Anglican theologian of the sixteenth century, Richard Hooker. Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Hooker’s magnificent, though unfinished treatise, begins with these words: “He that goeth about to persuade a multitude, that they are not so well governed as they ought to be, shall never want attentive and favorable hearers ….” More people should read Hooker.