777 THE AGE OF REASON

THE AGE OF REASON
1453 to 1789
Volume 2 of “AN ESSAY IN UNIVERSAL HISTORY”
From an Orthodox Christian Point of View
Vladimir Moss
@ Copyright, Vladimir Moss, 2019. All Rights Reserved

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Romania has passed away, Romania is taken.
Even if Romania has passed away, it will flower and bear fruit again.
Pontic folk-song, on the Fall of Constantinople.
The chief gift of nature… is freedom.
Leonardo da Vinci.
As free, and not using your liberty as a cloak of maliciousness,
But as the servants of God.
I Peter 2.16.
The king is above the law, as both the author and the giver of strength thereto.
King James I of England.
At different times, in different places, Emperor and Anarchist alike may find it
convenient to appeal to Holy Writ.
Sir Edmund Leech.
We are very apt all of us to call that faith, that perhaps may be but carnal imagination.
Oliver Cromwell (1647).
[The people’s] liberty consists in having government… It is not their having a share
in government, sir, that is nothing pertaining to them. A subject and a sovereign are
clear different things…
King Charles I of England (1649).
We still believe and maintain that our Kings derive not their title from the people, but
from God; that to Him only they are accountable; that it belongs not to subjects either
to create or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a
fundamental hereditary right of succession.
King Charles II of England (1681).
Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into the world to make men see double,
and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot obey two masters… Seeing there
are no men on earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual
commonwealth among men that are yet in the flesh.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
What is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge bishops, taking to himself a power
which has not been given him by God?… This is apostasy from God.
Patriarch Nikon of Moscow, Razzorenie.
Poor human reason, when it trusts in itself, substitutes the strangest absurdities for
the highest divine concepts.
St. John Chrysostom.
The Wars of these Times are rather to be Waged with gold than with Iron.

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William Paterson, founder of the Bank of England (1694).
[A Tory is] one that believes God, not the people, to be the origin of all civil power.
John Wesley.
He hasn’t changed, your little god on earth –
He’s still peculiar as the day you gave him birth.
He’d live a better life, at least,
If you’d not given him a glimpse of heaven’s light.
He calls it reason – which gives him the right
To be more bestial than any beast.
Goethe, Faust, Prologue in Heaven.
Monarchies conform best to human nature, and therefore constitute the most durable
form of state.
Gianbattista Vico.
Since the day a popular assembly condemned Jesus Christ to death the
Church has known that the rule of the majority can lead to any crime.
Jacques Bénigne Bossuet.
We have no government capable of contending with human passions, unbridled by
morality and religion… Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious
people.
American President John Adams.
By God’s dispensation it has fallen to me to correct both the state and the clergy; I am
to them both sovereign and patriarch; they have forgotten that in [pagan] antiquity
these [roles] were combined… I have conquered an empire, but have never been able to
conquer myself.
Tsar Peter the Great.
The good of the people must be the great purpose of government. By the laws of nature
and of reason, the governors are invested with power to that end. And the greatest
good of the people is liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual.
Diderot, Encyclopedia.
I must lie like a devil, not timidly, or only in passing, but boldly and always.
Voltaire, Letter to Thiriot.
If we can gain something by being honest, we will be it; and if we have to deceive, we
shall be cheats.
King Frederick the Great of Prussia.
Whatever I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is wrong; the best of all
casuists is the conscience… Reason deceives us only too often and we have earned all
too well the right to reject it, but conscience never deceives.

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Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract.
I love the cause of liberty, but the madness of the multitude is but one degree better
than submission to the Tea Act.
James Allen of Philadelphia.
The State, it seems to me, is not made for religion, but religion for the State.
Abbé Guillaume Raynal (1780).