By Orestes A. Brownson

As found in The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, edited by Henry F. Brownson. Originally published in Brownson’s Quarterly Review in October 1848 as a single article, it has been here split into two parts for the reader’s convenience. Read Part II here.

We take, in our political essays, unwearied pains to make ourselves understood, and to guard against being misapprehended; but, through our own fault or that of our readers, our success has rarely corresponded to our efforts. On all sides, from all quarters, we are charged with being hostile to liberty and favorable to despotism, — the enemy of the people, and the friend of their oppressors. We could smile at this ridiculous charge, were it not that some honest souls are found who appear to believe it, and some moon-struck scribblers make it the occasion of exciting unjust prejudices against our friends, and of placing them, as well as ourselves, in a false position before the public. Injustice to us personally is of no moment, and demands of us no attention; but when, owing to our peculiar position, it can hardly fail to work injustice to others, we are bound to notice and to repel it.

The age in which we live is an age of theoretical, and, to a great extent, of practical anarchy. Its ideas and movements are marked by impatience of restraint, denial of law, and contempt of authority. We have seen this, and have felt it our duty to protest against it, and to do what we could, in our limited sphere, to recall men to a sense of the necessity of government, and to the fact of their moral obligation to uphold the supremacy of law. This is our offence. Yet one would naturally suppose that people of ordinary intelligence, somewhat acquainted with our past history, might, without much difficulty, believe that in this our motive has been to serve the cause of freedom, not that of despotism. We, in fact, have done it, because liberty is impossible without order, order is impossible without government, and government in any worthy sense of the term is impossible without a settled conviction on the part of the people of its legitimacy, and of their obligation in conscience to obey it. Nothing deserving the name of government can be founded on the sense of the agreeable or of the useful. Governments, so called, which appeal to nothing higher, more catholic, and more stable, are mere creatures of passion or caprice, and must follow the lead of popular folly and excess, instead of restraining them, and directing the general activity to the public good. They are not governments, but mere instruments for the private gain or aggrandizement of the adroit and scheming few who contrive to possess themselves of their management. It is philosophically and historically demonstrable, that the permanence and stability of government, and its wise and just administration for the common weal, — the only legitimate end of its institution, — are impracticable, unless the government is held to rest on the universal and unalterable sense of duty, under the protection of religion.

This truth, though, in fact, a very commonplace truth, our age overlooks, or, if it does not overlook, it rejects. Hence the danger with which liberty in our times is threatened. We have believed it, therefore, not improper to guard against this danger, and in order to do so, we have traced government back to its source, and to the foundation of its authority. We have found its origin, not in the people, but in God, from whom is all power; and we have concluded from this its divine right, within its legitimate province, to our allegiance. It has, since it derives its authority from God, a divine right to command, and, if so, we must be bound in conscience to obey it. Then it rests, not on the sense of the agreeable or of the useful, to fluctuate as these fluctuate, but on the sense of duty, — and not merely duty to our country or to mankind, but duty to God — a duty founded in the unalterable relations of man to his Maker. This raises political allegiance and obedience to the law to the rank of moral virtue, and declares their violation to be a sin against God, to whom we belong, all we have, and all we are. Hence, in its legitimate province, even civil government becomes sacred and inviolable; and therefore we assert, on the one hand, our duty to obey it, and, on the other, deny the right of revolution, what La Fayette calls “the sacred right of insurrection.”

Here, in general terms, is the doctrine we have endeavoured to inculcate. That it is hostile to the political atheism now so rife, we concede. We are Christians, and do not understand tin; possibility of being Christians, and yet atheists in politics. We have but one set of principles, and these are determined by our religion. We cannot adopt one set of principles in our religion and a contradictory set in our politics, saying ” Good Lord ” in the one, and “Good Devil” in the other. We are too far behind the age for that. But that this doctrine is hostile to liberty or favorable to despotism, we do not concede, — nay, positively deny. In setting it forth, we have dwelt on that phase of it directly opposed to the dangerous tendencies of the age, because it was not necessary to guard against tendencies from which we have nothing to apprehend, and because we presume that our readers would of themselves see that it had another phase equally opposed to the opposite class of tendencies. But for the hundredth time in our short life we have learned that the writer who presumes any thing on the intelligence or discrimination of the bulk of readers presumes too much, and will assuredly be disappointed. The doctrine protects the government against radicals, rebels, and revolutionists; but it protects, also, the people against tyrants and oppressors. The fears of our politicians on this last point, whether real or affected, do little credit to their sagacity. The monsters which affright them a little more light would enable them to see are as harmless as the charred stump or decaying log which the benighted traveller mistakes for bear or panther.

When we assert the doctrine of legitimacy, we are understood to assert passive obedience and non-resistance to tyrants; but needs it any extraordinary intellectual power and cultivation to perceive that legitimacy, while it smites the rebel or the revolutionist, must equally smite the tyrant or usurper? If the doctrine asserts the right of legitimate, it must deny the right of illegitimate government; if it denies the right to disobey the legitimate authority, it must also deny the right of illegitimate authority to command; if it disarms the subject before the legal authority, it must equally disarm the illegal authority before the subject. How, then, from the fact that we are forbidden to resist or to subvert legitimate government, the legal constitution of the state, conclude that we are forbidden to resist or to depose the tyrant? Tyranny, oppression, is never legal, and therefore no tyrant or oppressor ever is or can be the legitimate sovereign. To resist him is not to resist the legitimate authority, and therefore demands for its justification no assertion of the revolutionary principle. How is it, then, that you do not see that the doctrine of legitimacy gives a legal right to resist whatever is illegal, and therefore lays a solid foundation for liberty?

People, we know, are prejudiced against the doctrine which asserts the divine origin and right of government, but it is because they misapprehend the doctrine, and because they identify liberty with democracy. The doctrine, undoubtedly, does assert the sacredness, inviolability, and legitimacy of every actual political constitution, whatever its form, and that the monarchical or aristocratic order, where it is the established order, is as legitimate as the democratic. But, if liberty and democracy are one and the same thing, since the monarchical order is that which is actually the established order in most states, liberty in most states is precluded, and the people are and must be slaves. Yet is it true that liberty and democracy are identical or convertible terms? Democracy, whose expression is universal suffrage, intrusts every citizen with a share in the administration of the government, which is and can be done by no other political order. But the elective franchise is a trust, not a right, and therefore to withhold it is not to withhold freedom. Liberty is in the possession and exercise of our natural rights. We have none of us any natural right to govern; for under the law of nature all men are equals, and no one has the right to exercise authority over others. The franchise is a municipal grant, and depends on the will of the political sovereign. Liberty, unless the question be between nation and nation, is not a predicate of the government, but of the subject, and of the subject not in his quality of a constituent element of the sovereignty, but in his quality of subject. As subject he may be free, without being intrusted with authority to govern, and therefore may be free under other forms of government than the democratic.

In fact, democratic politicians never attain to the conception of liberty. The basis of their theory of government is despotism. They make the right to govern a natural right, and differ from the confessedly despotic politicians only in claiming for every man what these claim for only one. They make government a personal right, incident to manhood, inalienable, and inamissible, — not a solemn trust which the trustee is bound to hold and exercise according to law, and for which he is accountable. Hence it is that democracy always sooner or later terminates in despotism or autocracy. We deny that government is ever a personal right, whether of the one, the few, or the many, and therefore deny that a man has a natural right to a share in the administration. He only has the right to whom the power is delegated by the competent authority, and he holds it, not as a personal right, but as a trust. Consequently, we do not concede that the establishment of the democratic regime is at all essential to the establishment or maintenance of liberty. He is free, enjoys his liberty, who is secured in the possession and enjoyment of all his natural rights ; and this is done wherever the legitimate authority governs, and governs according to the principles of justice. We are aware of no form of government that cannot so govern, or which cannot also govern otherwise, if it choose.

We are republicans, because republicanism is here the established order, but we confess that we do not embrace, and never have embraced, as essential to liberty, or even as compatible with liberty, the popular democratic doctrine of the country. We beg leave to refer here to our remarks on Democracy which we wrote in 1837, and published in the first number of The Boston Quarterly Review, January, 1838.* [Brownson’s Works, Vol. XV., pp. 4-ll] When we wrote them, we had the reputation of being one of the staunchest friends of liberty and the most ultra radicals in the country, — a fact which we commend to those of our former friends who are now so ready to represent us as having gone over to the side of despotism. We should not now call the doctrine democracy, as we did when we wrote it, nor should we use certain locutions, to be detected here and there, dictated by an erroneous theology; but the doctrine itself is our present doctrine, as clearly and as energetically expressed as we could now express it. It seems to us to contain an unanswerable refutation of the popular democratic principle and a triumphant vindication of the sovereignty of justice, — therefore, of the divine origin and right of government; for justice, in the sense the writer uses it, is identical with God, who alone is absolute, immutable, eternal, and sovereign Justice.

The purpose of the writer was evidently to obtain a solid foundation for individual freedom. If he, in order to do this, found and proved it necessary to assert the divine origin and right of government, to rise above the sovereignty of kings, of nobles, and even of the people, to the eternal and underived sovereignty of God, King of kings, and Lord of lords, how should we suspect ourselves of being hostile to liberty, when asserting the same doctrine in defence of the rights of government? Having for years proved the doctrine to be favorable to liberty, how could we believe the public would be so unjust to us as to accuse us of favoring despotism, because we undertook to prove it equally favorable to civil government? Why are we to be classed as hostile to freedom, because we defend in the interests of authority the doctrine which we have uniformly asserted as the only solid foundation of freedom? Whether we are right or wrong in the doctrine itself, or in its application, would it be any remarkable stretch of charity to give us credit for believing ourselves no less favorable to liberty in bringing the doctrine out in defence of authority, than we were in bringing it out in defence of the rights of the subject? Are liberty and authority necessarily incompatible one with the other? Or is it a blunder to derive both from the same source, and to suppose that what establishes the legitimacy of authority must needs establish also the legitimacy of liberty?

But is the doctrine of the divine origin and right of government hostile to liberty? If government derives its existence and its right from God, it can have no power but such as God delegates to it. But God is just, justice itself, and therefore can delegate to the government no power to do what is not just. Consequently, whenever a government exercises an unjust power or its powers unjustly, it exceeds its delegated powers, and is an usurper, a tyrant, and as such forfeits its right to command. Its acts are lawless, because contrary to justice, and do not bind the subject, because he can be bound only by the law. If they do not bind, they are null, and the attempt to enforce obedience to them may be resisted. Is it difficult, then, to understand, that, while the doctrine asserts the obligation in conscience of obedience to legitimate authority, to the government as long as it does not command any thing unjust, it condemns all illegal authority, and deprives the government of its right to exact obedience the moment it ceases to be just? What is there in this hostile to liberty? Is my liberty abridged when I am required to obey justice? If so, be good enough to tell me whence I obtain the right to do wrong?

Modern politicians assert, in opposition to the sovereignty of God, the sovereignty of the people. The will of the people is with them the ultimate authority. Is it they or we who are the truest friends of liberty? Liberty cannot be conceived without justice, and wherever there is justice there is liberty. Liberty, then, must be secured just in proportion as we secure the reign of justice. This is done in proportion to the guaranties we have that the will which rules shall be a just will. Is there any one who will venture to institute a comparison between the will of the people and the will of God? No one? Then who can pretend that the doctrine which makes the will of the people the sovereign is as favorable to liberty as the doctrine which makes the will of God the sovereign? The will of God is always just, because the divine will is never separable from the divine reason; but the will of the people may be, and often is, unjust, for it is separable from that reason, the only fountain of justice. We make the government a government of law, because we found it on will and reason; these modern politicians make it one of mere will, for they have no assurance that the will of the people will always be informed by reason. By what right, then, do they who maintain the very essence of despotism charge us with being hostile to liberty? Wherefore should we not, as we do, denounce them as the enemies, nay, the assassins of liberty, — men who salute her, and at the same instant smite her under the fifth rib?

But, it is gravely argued, if you deny the popular origin and right of government, you are a monarchist or an aristocrat. We deny the conclusion. If people would pay a little attention to what we actually say, before conjuring up their objections, they would, perhaps, reason less illogically. We raise no question between the sovereignty of kings and nobles and that of the people. What we deny is the human origin and right of government. We deny all undelegated sovereignty on earth, whether predicated of the king, the nobility, or the people. The question we are discussing lies a little deeper and a little further back than our modern politicians are aware. They are political atheists, and recognize for the state no power above the people; we are Christians, and hold that all power, that is, all legal authority, is from God; therefore we deny that kings, nobilities, or the people have any authority in their own right, and maintain that the state itself, however constituted, has only a delegated authority, and no underived sovereignty. They place the people back of the state, and maintain that it derives all its powers from the people, and is therefore bound to do their will; we tell them that the people themselves are not ultimate — have no power to delegate, except the power which Almighty God delegates to them, and this power they, as trustees, are bound to exercise according to his will, and are, therefore, not free to exercise it according to their own. They are desirous mainly of getting rid of kings and nobles, and, to do so, they assert the sovereignty of the popular will; we wish to get rid of despotism and to guard against all unjust government, and we assert the sovereignty of God over kings, nobles, and people, as well as over simple private consciences. Is this intelligible? Who, then, is the party hostile to liberty?

But, reply these same politicians, we do not mean to deny the sovereignty of God; we only mean that the authority he delegates is delegated to the people, and not to the king or the nobility. If by people you understand the people as the nation with its political faculties and organs, and not the people as mere isolated individuals, who disputes you? Who denies that kings and nobilities hold their powers, if not from, at least for, the people, and forfeit them the moment they refuse to exercise them for the common good of the people? What are you dreaming of? Do you suppose all men have lost their senses because you have lost yours? Who born and brought up under a republic, who acquainted with and embracing the teachings of Catholic theologians, is likely to hold the slavish doctrine, that the people are for the government, not the government for the people? Do you suppose that the republican and Catholic advocates the divine right of kings, and passive obedience, — the invention of Protestant divines, set forth and defended by that pedantic Scotchman, the so-called English Solomon? Who that has meditated on the saying of our blessed Lord, “Let him that would be greatest among you be your servant,” can hold that a prince receives power, or has any right to power, but for the public good? We do not deny the responsibility of kings and nobles to the nation, or that the nation may, under certain circumstances, and observing certain forms, call them to an account of their stewardship. But if this removes your objections to our doctrine, it by no means removes ours to yours. We complain of you, not because you make princes responsible to the people, that is, to the nation, but because you leave the people irresponsible, and make them subject to no law but their own will. You simply transfer the despotism from the one or the few to the many, and deny liberty by resting in the arbitrary will of the people. You stop with the people, and, if you do not deny, you at least fail to assert, the sovereignty of God; you tell them their will is sovereign, without adding that they have only a delegated sovereignty, and are bound to exercise it in strict accordance with and in obedience to the will of God. Here is your original sin. On your ground, no provision is made for liberty, none for resistance to tyranny, without resorting to the revolutionary principle, the pretended right to resist legitimate government, a contradiction in terms, and alike hostile to liberty and to authority. On our ground, the right to resist tyranny or oppression is secured without detriment to legitimate government; because the prince who transgresses his authority and betrays his trust forfeits his rights, and having lost his rights, he ceases to be sacred and inviolable.

But we are told, once more, that practically it can make no difference whether we say the will of God is sovereign, or the will of the people; for the will of the people is the true expression of the will of God, according to the maxim, Vox populi vox Dei. We deny it. The will of God is eternal and immutable justice, which the will of the people is not. The people may and do often actually do wrong. We have no more confidence in the assertion, ” The people can do no wrong,” than we have in its brother fiction, “The king can do no wrong.” The people must be taken either as individuals or as the state. As individuals, they certainly are neither infallible nor impeccable. As the state, they are only the aggregate of individuals. And are we to be told, that from an aggregation of fallibles, we can obtain infallibility? Show us a promise from Almighty God, made to the people in one capacity or the other, that he will preserve them from error and injustice, before you talk to us of their infallibility. The people in their collective capacity, that is, the state popularly constituted, never surpass the general average of the wisdom and virtue of the same people taken individually; and as this falls infinitely below infallibility, let us hear no more of the infallibility of the people. For very shame’s sake, after denying, as most of you do, the possibility of an infallible church immediately constituted and assisted by infinite wisdom, do not stultify yourselves by coming forward now to assert the infallibility of the people. If the people are infallible, what need of constitutions to protect minorities, and of contrivances for the security of individual liberty, which even we in our land of universal suffrage find to be indispensable?

But we return to our original position. All power is of God. By him kings reign and princes decree just things. Government is a sacred trust from him, to be exercised according to his will, for the public good. The government which he in his providence has instituted for a people, and which confines itself to its delegated powers, for the true end of government, is legitimate government, whatever its form, and cannot be resisted without sin. But the government which is arbitrarily imposed upon a people, or which betrays its trust, or usurps powers seriously to the injury of its subjects, is illegitimate, and has no claim to our allegiance. Such a government may be lawfully resisted, and sometimes to resist it becomes an imperative duty.

But who is to decide whether the actual government has transcended its powers, and whether the case has occurred when we are permitted or bound to resist it? This is a grave question, because, if the fact of illegitimacy be not established by some competent authority, they who resist run the hazard of resisting legitimate government, and of ruining both their own souls and their country. Evidently the individual is not to decide for himself by his own private judgment; for that would leave every one free to resist the government whenever he should choose, which would be whenever it should command any thing not to his liking. If he had the right thus to resist, the government would have no right to coerce his obedience, and there would be an end of all government. Evidently, again, not the people, for we must take the people either as a state, or as outside of the state. Outside of the state they are simple individuals, and, as we have seen, have not, and cannot have, the right to decide. As the state, they have no faculties and no organs but the government which is to be judged, and therefore can neither form nor express a judgment. Who, then? Evidently the power whose function it is to declare the law of God. Since the government derives its authority from God, and is amenable to his law, evidently it can be tried only under that law, and before a court which has authority to declare it, and to pronounce judgment accordingly.

But what shall be done in case there be no such court of competent jurisdiction? We reject the supposition. Almighty God could never give a law without instituting a court to declare it, and to judge of its infractions. We, as Catholics, know what and where that court is, and therefore cannot be embarassed by the question. If there are nations who have no such court, or who refuse to recognize the one Almighty God has established, that is their affair, not ours, and they, not we, are responsible for the embarrassments to which they are subjected. They, undoubtedly, are obliged either to assert passive obedience and non-resistance, or to deny the legitimacy of any government by asserting the right of revolution ; that is, they have no alternative but anarchy or despotism, as their history proves. But this is not our fault. We are not aware that we are obliged to exclude God and his church from our politics in order to accommodate ourselves to those who blaspheme the one and revile the other. We are not aware that we are obliged to renounce our reason, and reject the lessons of experience, because, if we admit them, they prove that Almighty God has made his church essential to the maintenance of civil authority on the one hand, and of civil liberty on the other, — because they prove that the state can succeed no better than the individual, without religion. We have never supposed that a man could be a Christian and exclude God from the state, and we have no disposition to concede, or to undertake to prove, that he can be. If the church is necessary as a teacher of piety and morals, she must be necessary to decide the moral questions which arise between prince and prince, and between prince and subject, and to maintain the contrary is only to contradict one’s self. Politics are nothing but a branch of general ethics, and ethics are simply practical theology. If there is any recognized authority in theology, that authority must have jurisdiction of every ethical question, that is, every question which involves considerations of right and wrong, in whatever department of life they may arise. You may tight against this as you please, but you cannot change the unalterable nature of things. It is useless as well as hard to kick against the pricks. The question of resistance, presents a case of conscience, a moral question, and as such belongs by its very nature to the spiritual order, and then necessarily falls under the jurisdiction of the legitimate representative of that order. All the great principles of politics and law are ethical, and treated as such by both Catholic and Protestant theologians. How, then, can we dispense with the agency of the church in politics, any more than in private morals or in faith itself? And are we to forego civil government, are we to submit passively to tyrants, or to rush into anarchy, because the madness or blindness of others leaves them no other alternative? Must we reject or refrain from using the infallible means which we possess for determining what is the law of God, because others discard them and attempt to get on without them? Must we strip ourselves and run naked through the streets, because some of our brethren obstinately persist in being Adamites? Really, this were asking too much of us.

But let no one be frightened out of his propriety, for we really say no more for our church than every sectarian claims for his sect, — no more in principle than was claimed last year by the Presbyterians, when they officially condemned the Mexican war, or by the Unitarians, when, as officially as was possible with their organization or want of organization, they did the same. The church, in the case we have supposed, decides only the morality or immorality of the act done or proposed to be done. And is there a Protestant who belongs to what is called a church who does not take his church as his moral teacher? When Philip of Hesse found his wife unsatisfactory to him, and wished to take unto himself another, did he not submit the question to Luther and the pastors of the new religion? What are your Protestant ministers, if not, in your estimation, among other things, teachers of morals? And in case of doubt, to whom would you apply for its resolution but to your church, such as it is? Do you say you would not? To whom, then? To your politicians? What! do you regard politicians as safer moral guides than your pastors? To the state? So you hold the state more competent to decide questions of morals than your church! But the state is the party accused; would you suffer it to be judge in its own cause? Then you are at its mercy, and are a slave. Trust your own judgment? But you are a party interested, and what right have you to be judge in your own cause?

The fact is, every man who admits religion at all must admit its jurisdiction over all moral questions, whether in their individual or in their social application, and therefore does and must defer in them to that authority which represents for him the spiritual order. The state has no commission as a teacher of morals or as a director of consciences, and unless you blend church and state, and absorb the spiritual in the temporal, you cannot claim authority for the state in any strictly moral question. The theory of our own institutions is the utter incompetency of the state in spirituals. But spirituals include necessarily every question of right and wrong, whether under the natural law or the revealed law, — a fact too often overlooked, and not sufficiently considered by some even of our nominally Catholic politicians and newspaper-writers and editors. If this be so, the legitimate province of the state is restricted to matters which pertain to human prudence and social economy. Within the limits of the law of God, that is, providing it violate no precept of the natural or revealed law, it is independent and free to pursue the policy which human wisdom and prudence suggest as best adapted to secure the public good. To give it a wider province would be to claim for it a portion at least of that very authority which Protestants make it an offence in us to claim even for the church of God. We claim here no direct temporal authority for the church, but we do claim, and shall, as long as we retain our reason, continue to claim for her, under God, supreme and exclusive jurisdiction over all questions which pertain to the spiritual order.

Continued in Part II