What better way to celebrate Constitution Day, than to question and delve deeper into arguably the world’s most important legal text with the help of political philosopher, business success, and author, Matthew Stewart.

Linfield honored this relatively new national holiday with an intellectual debate spurred by a remarkable lecture from Stewart on his recently published book, “Nature’s God.”

Stewart presented his lecture on Sept. 24 in Riley 201.

Stewart began his lecture by outlining the three themes that the framing of the Constitution operated on: The idea of the common good, reason, and self-transcendence.

He then talked about what sparked his interest in studying the Constitution, which led to the formation of his book, “Nature’s God.”

The poem, “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker,” sparked his initial interest in the subject. In this historical poem, a woman is confronted for acting sinfully by having multiple children amongst different fathers.

The event was sponsored by the Frederick Douglass Forum on Law, Rights and Justice and was coordinated by Associate Professor of Political Science and department chair, Nick Buccola.

In 1985, after graduating from Princeton, Stewart received the Sachs Scholarship to study at Oxford University. His focus was political philosophy and he earned a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford.

Steward quoted his favorite line in which Miss Polly Baker said, “’tis the Duty of the first and great Command of Nature, and of Nature’s God, Increase and multiply.”

This poem spurred Dr. Stewart to study the important and conflicting values of Nature’s God and the socially-standardized Calvinist God.

He referenced Ethan Allen, not the furniture guru as Stewart playfully corrected, and his thoughts on an infinite universe with endless stars and planets that are inhabited by space aliens.

The fact that a contributing member of our nation’s legal framework text was operating on such radical and progressive thought processes as “alien-talk” made Stewart question the traditional thinking that is widely accepted and rarely tested.

With these introductions laid, Stewart then explained his first pillar of studying the Constitution, the idea of the common good.

He told a story about Thomas Jefferson walking through France, seeing a poverty-stricken woman and giving her money to relieve her pain.

Jefferson then wrote to James Madison critiquing economic inequality and proposing two ideas that have come to be known as a progressive capitol tax and the “death tax.”

Finding that Jefferson, also, thought progressively and found that laws, in some cases, have conflicted with human being’s natural rights, proved important to Stewart’s study of the origins of the Constitution.

This built up the conflict mentioned before, nature’s God versus the religious, traditional God.

His next theme, reason, called upon another historical letter from John Adams to Thomas Jefferson in 1815, in which he questioned whether the god of nature will rule by his own laws or if kings and preachers will rule by “fictitious miracle.”

Dr. Stewart then summarized a logical argument, based on Adams’ letter, that the Constitution was made as a result of reason and not religious intervention or supernatural aid, which would mean that reason is the foundation that nature operates on.

This part of the argument paints the bigger picture that Stewart tried to make in his title and concept “Nature’s God,” that a deity that is acting on natural laws and answers to reason.

Lastly, he addressed the theme of self-transcendence by looking at the personal growth that he found in the text of Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography.

Stewart appreciates more evidence of radical or progressive thinking by men who had a large influence in our nation’s constitution to prove that stagnant thinking was not something that this text promotes.

Stewart’s argument that the U.S. Constitution was written by men who believe in intellectual growth and progress was brought home by Stewart sharing Jefferson’s proposal that U.S. citizens rip up the constitution every 19 years to promote the rights of the living generation.