Sublime

philos as the root of Philadelphia,

16with all the silver and gold that you shall find in the whole province of Babylonia, and with the freewill offerings of the people and the priests, given willingly for the house of their God in Jerusalem.

The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king. This is the only way in which truth can ever find refuge from public persecution, and the good man survive the bad government.

The lovers of liberty thought they were leaving it unlimited, when they were only leaving it undefined.

your debts are paid in the one great debt of nature.

As a man can find one jailer more lax than another, so he could find one employer more kind than another; he has at least a choice of tyrants.

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 arg