The redeemer of many souls returned to heaven.

Former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young tells Newsmax that it's a mistake to look at former South African President Nelson Mandela as a political figure and forget how his strong religious beliefs sustained him.  "Many of these African leaders of Mandela's generation were educated by Christian missionaries in South Africa," Young said Friday in an interview with Newsmax TV about the death of Mandela on Thursday at age 95. " "We forget, we tend to look at Mandela politically, but there's also a religious component there that we ought not forget," added Young, a leader in the civil rights movement and a former congressman and Atlanta mayor. Former US president Bill Clinton, who was in office when Nelson Mandela took power in South Africa, on Thursday mourned the death of a "champion for human dignity and freedom". "Today the world has lost one of its most important leaders and one of its finest human beings," Clinton said in a statement. "History will remember Nelson Mandela as a champion for human dignity and freedom, for peace and reconciliation," he added. In Jesse Jackson's last conversation with Nelson Mandela, the former South African president told him he was glad he was caught and jailed for 27 years before he ended up with innocent blood on his hands. Not all world leaders are also heroes. Nelson Mandela, however, was both. Said Christopher Ruddy, CEO and editor of Newsmax Media Inc. I do not have the full answers as to how Mandela overcame this oppression. But I do believe that Mandela discovered a power deep within the human spirit, one that Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote about from his own Gulag experiences, and detailed in his fictional "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," that no one person, no system of government can ever really steal one’s God-given freedom. Mandela also understood that our freedom is inexplicably linked to others. He wrote, “For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.” he added.