THE PAINFUL AWARENESS:

When men appeal from Tyranny to God (Edward Coleson, June 1972, The Freeman)

Our Founding Fathers quite properly had a bad conscience because of their own inconsistencies, for their claims to freedom were based on an appeal to a Higher Power, not just to some abstract principles as with the French Revolution a few years later. After all, their ancestors had resisted the tyranny of their rulers for centuries by insisting that "the King is also under God and under the Law." The Puritans had even fought a war with Charles I a little more than a century and a quarter before our Revolution to maintain their God-given right to freedom. Patrick Henry later reminded George III that Charles I had had his Cromwell just as Caesar had had his Brutus, but the figure of speech was not appropriate. It would have been more fitting to remind His Majesty that David had had his Nathan, Ahab his Elijah, Belshazzar his Daniel, and Herod his John the Baptist, to name a few kings and their prophets; like Byron's "Prisoner of Chillon," the Puritans were wont to "appeal from tyranny to God." This was more than a pious gesture or a political gimmick, more than high sounding rhetoric without any basis in reality. The Puritans were men of a Book and they found principles therein that applied to the Old Testament era and to the England of the Stuarts as well.

The typical oriental despot of the ancient Near East was a godking, head of both Church and State. When religion was a powerful force, this gave his subjects no appeal from his authority. The Hebrew prophets resisted similar pressures from their rulers and never let them forget that "the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men. . . ." (Daniel 4:25) This was the Puritan approach. In like manner a few hardy Germans more recently reminded Hitler, "Gott is mein Führer." Such thinking is so foreign to modern philosophy and legal theory that Hitler had his way with the German nation - to its ultimate destruction. But it has not always been so.

The men who founded our nation were very conscious of the concept of a Higher Law. It would not be an exaggeration to say our government was founded on this principle. Ten years before our "embattled farmers fired the shot heard round the world" at Lexington and Concord, William Blackstone began the publication of his famous Commentaries on the Laws of England, dedicated to the proposition that God is the ultimate authority. The colonists so avidly seized on his writings that a decade later Burke told Parliament, on the eve of the American Revolution, that there were more copies of Blackstone's Commentaries in the Colonies than in England.

It has been customary in the "debunking era" of the recent past to insist that our colonial leaders were not saints and that those who may have made any religious pretensions were more apt to be Deists than Christians. Certainly there was a considerable influence from the Enlightenment on this side of the Atlantic, but at least Deists believed in God's Law. Even such a notorious enemy of the "religious establishment" as Voltaire is quoted as saying that if there were no God, we should have to invent one, By contrast, contemporary philosophers say, according to Harvey Cox, "If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him." We have come a long way since the founding of this nation and it has not all been uphill. If they did not always live up to the standards set by their own consciences, as in the case of slavery, they were still painfully aware of their shortcomings, They also believed in their accountability to the Judge of all the earth "God is not dead, nor doth he sleep," as Longfellow tells us in the familiar Christmas carol.