Last week, in scanning various headlines, I was delighted to see – among all the bad news – this story: “George Washington’s 110 Rules of Civility.”

The link included brings the reader to the Mount Vernon website.

This isn’t advice George Washington doled out. Rather, it’s a series of aphorisms he learned as a youth that greatly impacted his life. If you want to know what made the father of our country tick, read the “Rules of Civility.”

Technically they are not his “110 rules of civility.” But he has helped make them famous. In many ways, this list of 110 maxims are similar to the book of Proverbs. Some have noted that they were originally written in the 1600s by Catholics in France.

In a book I co-wrote with Dr. Peter Lillback on the faith of our first president, “George Washington’s Sacred Fire,” we have an appendix that reprints all 110 of these rules.

We note, “George Washington, sometime before the age of 16, transcribed these Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour In Company and Conversation. Most historians of Washington see a great deal of consistency between his life and these rules for ‘civility and decent behavior.’”

Here are a few examples:

While the Rules of Civility are not actual quotes from the Bible, they echo Biblical teaching.

When George Washington was 11 years old, his father died. His Christian mother, Mary Ball Washington, provided much Biblical guidance for him. Meanwhile, his formal education came to a halt. Nonetheless, George continued to read and study all his life–-including these Rules of Civility.
I asked for some comments about the Rules of Civility from Dr. Peter Lillback, who is the founding president of Providence Forum, for which I now serve as executive director.

He told me, “These principles communicate how to behave when one is with people of rank, and when eating with them at table. They emphasize noble conduct and ground good character in conscience, termed the celestial fire given to men to know right from wrong.”
Here are more samples from the Rules of Civility:

Lillback notes, “Those who study Washington’s life generally agree that these principles became part of his conduct and character. They shaped him into a sterling gentleman in his era, who ultimately became the indispensable man in America’s founding.”

Some of the final sayings in this short book that so impacted the founder of our nation underscored the importance of reverence for God:

For my Providence Forum television documentary on George Washington, Dr. Cal Beisner, author and former seminary professor, commented, “Washington built a lot of his life around the Rules of Civility. He wrote on each of these different rules and tried to measure up to them himself. And it was very, very clear, I think, that he wasn’t doing this just simply, you know, to look good in front of other people. He was doing this because he believed that this pleased God. And Washington was a man who feared the Lord, and lived in accordance with that.”

We have a crisis in character today. We can see it in virtually all the headlines, as leading men and women from all sort of professions get tripped up by their own character flaws. But the Rule of Civility made popular by our first president provide timely and timeless advice to try and avoid such pitfalls.

This article was originally published by the WND News Center.

This post originally appeared on WND News Center.