Journal: Bibliotheca Sacra
Volume: BSAC 52:205 (Jan 1895)
Article: The American Republic And The Debs Insurrection
Author: Z. Swift Holbrook

BSac 52:205 (Jan 1895) p. 135

The American Republic And The Debs Insurrection

Mr. Z. Swift Holbrook

The American Republic is the fruitage of a religious inspiration. Our democratic institutions, our notions of liberty and equality, had their origin with men who practised every form of self-denial, that they might be free from hierarchical authority and worship God according to the dictates of conscience. They were not men, like the colony that landed at Jamestown in 1607, moved by the spirit of adventure or by the desire to acquire,—both worthy and useful passions when subordinated to higher ends,—but they came to an unknown land, braving the perils of the sea and enduring the privations incident to such a perilous journey, that they might have freedom to worship God.

To what extent these men had caught the inspiration of Luther and had given it a new interpretation, need not here be traced; but the age was one of discovery, of heroism, of adventure, of awakened intellect,—giving the world the revival of faith, hope, and learning. It was the Elizabethan Age in literature. It was the period of the centuries when, freed from the bonds of ecclesiastical authority, individualism burst the barriers which had restrained it, and men took on new conceptions of liberty and of individual worth. Man as an individual, a unit, free and independent in his relations to the unseen, and bound by social compacts only because thus his individualism found higher freedom and fuller development,—this was the conception that inspired

BSac 52:205 (Jan 1895) p. 136

the men who founded this Republic, and was enunciated by those choicest minds and spirits of the seventeenth century.

It was not a mere intellectual conception; it was a spiritual experience, involving the conscience, and having practical relations with life, liberty, property, and reputation. For these very reasons it led the Pilgrims and the Puritans across the sea.

When man has tasted the sweets of liberty, persecution augments, but it cannot destroy, its growth. Wyclif caught the idea one hundred and forty years before Luther, and taught that the New Testament is a sufficient guide in church government. The growth of that idea and its final permanency in men’s minds, before the assent of king and priest, cost many lives and untold suffering. Henry VIII., Edward VI., Bloody Mary, and Queen Elizabeth found people who, with Peter, said, It is right to obey God rather than men. That class sought to purify the church,—its clergy, its membership, its forms of worship, and its ordinances. They were known as Puritans. It was a common thing for them to resist unto the death any attempt of human authority to take the place of Christ over the conscience.

While...