The Emerging Pattern

I just wanted to emphasize the words of John Locke that were in the comments on the last post. And then to display them side by side with the words of Jefferson in both the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom.

The pattern concerning the relationship between God and American Freedom emerges more clearly in this context.

From The Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

From the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom:

“Where as Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by civil incapacitations, tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the Holy author of our religion, who being Lord both of body and mind, yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either, as it was in his Almighty power to do;”

From the second chapter of Book II of the Two Treatises on Government by John Locke:

TO understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are
naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.

A state also of equality, wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another; there being nothing more evident, than that creatures of the same species and rank, promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without subordination or subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all should, by any manifest declaration of His will, set one above another, and confer on him, by an evident and clear appointment, an undoubted right to dominion and sovereignty.