01.3b. Calvinism & Politics, pt. 2

Of an entirely different nature, on the contrary, is the last question to which I referred, namely, the duty of the government as regards the sovereignty of the individual person.

In the second part of this lecture I have already indicated that the developed man also possesses an individual sphere of life, with sovereignty in his own circle. Here I do not refer to the family, for this is a social bond between several individuals. I have reference to that which is thus expressed by Prof. Weitbrecht: “Ist doch vermöge seines Gewissens jeder ein König ein Souverain, der über jede Verantwortung exhaben is.”(16) (“Every man stands a king in his conscience, a sovereign in his own person, exempt from all responsibility.”) Or that which Held has formulated in this way: “In gewisser Beziehung wird jeder Mensch supremus oder Souverain sein, denn jeder Mensch muss eine Sphäre haben, und hat sie auch wirklich, in welcher er der Oberste ist.”(17) (In some respects every man is a sovereign. for everybody must have and has a sphere of life of his own, in which he has no one above him, but God alone.) I do not point to this to over-estimate the importance of conscience, for whosoever wishes to liberate conscience, where God and His Word are concerned, I meet as an opponent, not as an ally. This, however, does not prevent my maintaining the sovereignty of conscience as the palladium of all personal liberty, in this sense –that conscience is never subject to man but always and ever to God Almighty.

This need of the personal liberty of conscience, however, does not immediately assert itself. It does not express itself with emphasis in the child, but only in the mature man; and in the same way it mostly slumbers among undeveloped peoples, and is irresistible only among highly developed nations. A man of ripe and rich development will rather become a voluntary exile, will rather suffer imprisonment, nay, even sacrifice life itself, than tolerate constraint in the forum of his conscience. And the deeply rooted repugnance against the Inquisition, which for three long centuries would not be assuaged, grew up from the conviction that its practices violated and assaulted human life in man. This imposes on the government a twofold obligation. In the first place it must cause this liberty of conscience to be respected by the Church, and in the second place, it must give way itself to the sovereign conscience.

As regards the first, the sovereignty of the Church finds its natural limitation in the sovereignty of the free personality. Sovereign within her own domain, she has no power over those who live outside of that sphere. And wherever, in violation of this principle, transgression of power may occur, the government has to respect the claims on protection of every citizen. The Church may not be forced to tolerate as a member one whom she feels obliged to expel from her circle; but on the other hand no citizen of the State must be compelled to remain in a church which his conscience forces him to leave.

Meantime what the government in this respect demands of the churches, it must practice itself, by allowing to each and every citizen liberty of conscience, as the primordial and inalienable right of all men.

It has cost a heroic struggle to wrest this greatest of all human liberties from the grasp of despotism; and streams of human blood have been poured out before the object was attained. But for this very reason every son of the Reformation tramples upon the honor of the fathers, who does not assiduously and without retrenching, defend this palladium of our liberties. In order that it may be able to rule men, the government must respect this deepest ethical power of our human existence. A nation, consisting of citizens whose consciences are bruised, is itself broken in its national strength.

And even if I am forced to admit that our fathers, in theory, had not the courage of the conclusions which follow from this liberty of conscience, for the liberty of speech, and the liberty of worship; even if I am well aware that they made a desperate effort to hinder the spread of literature which they disliked, by censure and refusal of publication –all this does not set aside the fact that the free expression of thought, by the spoken and printed word, has first achieved its victory in the Calvinistic Netherlands. Whosoever was elsewhere straightened, could first enjoy the liberty of ideas and the liberty of the press on Calvinistic ground. And thus the logical development of what was enshrined in the liberty of conscience, as well as that liberty itself, first blessed the world from the side of Calvinism.

For it is true that, in Roman lands, spiritual and political despotism have been finally vanquished by the French Revolution, and that in so far we have gratefully to acknowledge that this revolution also began by promoting the cause of liberty. But whosoever learns from history that the guillotine, all over France, for years and years could not rest from the execution of those who were of a different mind; whosoever remembers how cruelly and wantonly the Roman Catholic clergy were murdered, because they refused to violate their conscience by an unholy oath; or whosoever, like myself, by a sad experience, knows the spiritual tyranny which liberalism and conservatism on the European Continent have applied, and are still applying, to those who have chosen different paths, –is forced to admit that liberty in Calvinism and liberty in the French Revolution are two quite different things.

In the French Revolution a civil liberty for every Christian to agree with the unbelieving majority; in Calvinism, a liberty of conscience, which enables every man to serve God according to his own conviction and the dictates of his own heart.

Footnotes for Lecture 3

1. BANCROFT, History of the United States of America. Fifteenth Edition; Boston 1853: I. 464; Ed. New York, 1891, I, 319

2. (Ed.) BURKE, Works, III p. 25, Ed. McLean, London.

3. American Constitutions by FRANKLIN B. HUGH; Albany; Weed, Parsons & Co; 1872. Vol.1, p.5.

4. Ibidem, p.8.

5. Ibidem, p.19.

6. Ibidem, II, p. 549.

7. Ibidem, p. 555.

8. Ibidem, p. 555

9. Ibidem, p. 549.

10. VON HOLZ, Verfassung und Democratie der Vereinigten Staten von America; Dusseldorf, 1873: I, p.96.

11. JOHN F. MORSE, Thomas Jefferson; Boston. 1883; p. 147. In a positively Christian sense Hamilton proposed in a letter to Bayard (April, 1801) the founding of “A Christian Constitutional Society,” and wrote in another letter, quoted by Henry Cabot Lodge, Alexander Hamilton; Boston, 1892: p. 256: “When I find the doctrines of Atheism openly advanced in the Parisian Convention. and heard with loud applause; when I see the sword of fanaticism extended to force a political creed upon citizens, who were invited to submit to the arms of France as the harbingers of Liberty; when I behold the hand of rapacity outstretched to prostate and ravish the monuments of religious worship, I acknowledge, that I am glad to believe, that there is no real resemblance between what was the cause of America and the cause of France.”

12. Cf. Dr A. KUYPER Calvinism the Source and Guarantee of Our Constitutional Liberties 1873: and Dr A. KUYPER Sovereignty in the Spheres of Society, 1880.

13. Edition of Migne at Paris, 1841. Tome 1, proof 1.

14. (Ed.) Nicholas Crellius, chancellor of Christian I, leader in the crypto-calvinistic struggle in Germany. Beheaded in 1601, after ten years of harsh imprisonment. He had become much hated by the nobles. The process which led to his death sentence as traitor was conducted very arbitrarily.

15. Tome VIII, p. 516c; Ed Schippers.

16. WEITBRECHT, Woher und Wohin; Stuttgart, 1877; p. 103.

17. HELD, Verfassungsysteem, I, p. 234.