Beacon Lights of History, Volume 11 | Page 4

against the sovereignty of God,--the only ultimate authority.
By the Hebrew writers, bad rulers are viewed as a misfortune to the
people ruled, which they must learn to bear, hoping for better times,
trusting in Providence for relief, rather than trying to remove by
violence. It is He who raises up deliverers in His good time, to reign in
justice and equity. If anything can be learned from the Hebrew
Scriptures in reference to rights, it is the injunction to obey God rather
than man, in matters where conscience is concerned; and this again
merges into duty, but is susceptible of vast applications to conduct as
controlled by individual opinion.
Under Roman rule native rights fare no better. Paul could appeal from
Jewish tyrants to Caesar in accordance with his rights as a Roman
citizen; but his Roman citizenship had nothing to do with any inborn
rights as a man. Paul could appeal to Caesar as a Roman citizen. For
what? For protection, for the enjoyment of certain legal privileges
which the Empire had conferred upon Roman citizenship, not for any
rights which he could claim as a human being. If the Roman laws
recognized any rights, it was those which the State had given, not those
which are innate and inalienable, and which the State could not justly
take away. I apprehend that even in the Greek and Roman republics no
civil rights could be claimed except those conferred upon men as
citizens rather than as human beings. Slaves certainly had no rights,
and they composed half the population of the old Roman world. Rights
were derived from decrees or laws, not from human consciousness.
Where then did Jefferson get his ideas as to the equal rights to which
men were born? Doubtless from the French philosophers of the
eighteenth century, especially from Rousseau, who, despite his
shortcomings as a man, was one of the most original thinkers that his
century produced, and one of the most influential in shaping the
opinions of civilized Europe. In his "Contrat Social" Rousseau
appealed to consciousness, rather than to authorities or the laws of
nations. He took his stand on the principles of eternal justice in all he
wrote as to civil liberties, and hence he kindled an immense enthusiasm
for liberty as an inalienable right.

But Rousseau came from Switzerland, where the passion for personal
independence was greater than in any other part of Europe,--a passion
perhaps inherited from the old Teutonic nations in their forests, on
which Tacitus dilates, next to their veneration for woman the most
interesting trait among the Germanic barbarians. No Eastern nation,
except the ancient Persians, had these traits. The law of liberty is an
Occidental rather than an Oriental peculiarity, and arose among the
Aryans in their European settlements. Moreover, Rousseau lived in a
city where John Calvin had taught the principles of religious liberty
which afterwards took root in Holland, England, Scotland, and France,
and created the Puritans and Huguenots. The central idea of Calvinism
is the right to worship God according to the dictates of conscience,
enlightened by the Bible. Rousseau was no Calvinist, but the principles
of religious and civil liberty are so closely connected that he may have
caught their spirit at Geneva, in spite of his hideous immorality and his
cynical unbelief. Yet even Calvin's magnificent career in defence of the
right of conscience to rebel against authority, which laid the solid
foundation of theology and church discipline on which Protestantism
was built up, arrived at such a pitch of arbitrary autocracy as to show
that, if liberty be "human" and "native," authority is no less so.
Whether, then, liberty is a privilege granted to a few, or a right to which
all people are justly entitled, it is bootless to discuss; but its
development among civilized nations is a worthy object of historical
inquiry.
A late writer, Douglas Campbell, with some plausibility and
considerable learning, traces to the Dutch republic most that is valuable
in American institutions, such as town-meetings, representative
government, restriction of taxation by the people, free schools,
toleration of religious worship, and equal laws. No doubt the influence
of Holland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in stimulating free
inquiry, religious toleration, and self-government, as well as learning,
commerce, manufactures, and the arts, was considerable, not only on
the Puritan settlers of New England, but perhaps on England itself. No
doubt the English Puritans who fled to Holland during the persecutions
of Archbishop Laud learned much from a people whose religious oracle

was Calvin, and whose great hero was William the Silent. Mr. Motley,
in the most brilliant and perhaps the most learned history ever written
by an American, has made a revelation of a nation heretofore supposed
to be dull, money-loving, and uninteresting. Too high praise cannot