Sublime

AN UNWAVERING ADVOCATE of independence, Washington thought his compatriots would eventually come to share his belief. “My countrymen, I know, from their form of government and steady attachment heretofore to royalty, will come reluctantly into the idea of independency,” he wrote that spring. “But time and persecution brings many wonderful things to

Locke’s breakthrough — unimagined even by Christian thinkers as formidable as Thomas Aquinas — was to combine the classical view of natural law with the concept of inalienable rights. In his Two Treatises of Government (1689), Locke identified these rights as “life, liberty, and property.” He drew from the Scriptures, as well as from Cicero, to

We must understand this old limitless hilarity and human confidence,

Moreover, the Federal Government is, as I have just observed, the exception; the Government of the States is the rule.

and it is no exaggeration to talk of a bomb as the symbol of a baby.

The command of Christ is impossible, but it is not insane; it is rather sanity preached to a planet of lunatics.

God is not the only chief character of the Old Testament; God is properly the only character in the Old Testament.

He issued resounding paeans to the freed slaves and former indentured servants, farmers and shopkeepers, who made up his army: “The recent instance of uncomplaining patience during the scarcity of provisions in camp is a fresh proof that they possess in an eminent degree the spirit of soldiers and the magnanimity of patriots.”