Excerpt from The Biblical Repository, Vol. 1: Nos. I-IV

It is singular to remark, however, that in all the fierce discus sions of the time relative to religious liberty, which formed the very basis of the Reformation, and in the violent rejection of the papal authority in matters of faith and religious practice, there was no direct or at least no efficient application of the same principles to civil rights. The governments continued as despotic as before and the question of any possible political reform does not seem to have been seriously agitated. But in England, the more practi cal tendency of the people produced, in time, the natural results of a struggle for liberty of any kind. The same principles and reasonings that led men to burst the shackles which ecclesiasti cal tyranny had imposed on them for ages, led them also to call in question the validity of that civil tyranny, by which they were deprived of their natural rights. It is thus that the Reformation in Germany, operating also upon England, and there extended to the kindred question of political liberty, may be regarded as the great ultimate cause, which led to the settlement of this western world. It is the great principle of liberty of thought, suggested to the mind of the Monk of Wittemberg, and by him spread out before the world, - and in England coupled with the great kindred principle of liberty of action, - that has lain at the foundation of all the mighty movements of succeeding cen turies. If it were right to refer to a single individual that which was but the expression of the spirit of an age, we might thus as cribe to Luther not only the Reformation in Germany and Eng land, but also regard his exertions as the germ, from which have sprung all the great political events that have since astonished and convulsed the world the revolutions of England and of France and with happier results, the foundation of a new em pire in a new hemisphere; with the revolution by which this last threw ofi' the pressure of a foreign oke, and founded, on a basis unknown in history, institutions 0 freedom which will bear the test of experience, so long as virtue and intelligence shall be the characteristics of the peo ls; but which, it requires not the pow er of prophetic vision to oresac, will be surely swept away, when ever Ignorance and irreligion shall become predominant in the land.

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