The Freeman 1972 - The Ludwig von Mises Institute

326 THE FREEMAN Junemost High ruleth in the kingdomof men...." (Daniel 4 :25) This\vas the Puritan approach. In likemanner a few hardy Germansmore recently reminded Hitler,"Gott is mein Fuhrer." Suchthinking is so foreign to modernphilosophy and legal theory thatHitler had his way with the Germannation - to its ultimate destruction.But it has not alwaysbeen so.The men who founded our nationwere very conscious of theconcept of a Higher Law. It wouldnot be an exaggeration to say ourgovernment was founded on thisprinciple. Ten years before our"embattled farmers fired the shotheard round the world" at Lexingtonand Concord, William Blackstonebegan the publication of hisfamous Commentaries on the Lawsof England, dedicated to the propositionthat God is the ultimateauthority. The colonists so avidlyseized on his writings that a decadelater Burke told Parliament,on the eve of the American Revolution,that there were more copiesof Blackstone's Commentariesin the Colonies than in England.It has been customary in the"debunking era" of the recent pastto insist that our colonial leaderswere not saints and that those whomay have made any religious pretensionswere more apt to beDeists than Christians. Certainlythere was a considerable' influencefrom the Enlightenment on thisside of the Atlantic, but at leastDeists believed in God's Law.Even such a notorious enemy ofthe "religious establishment" asVoltaire is quoted as saying thatif there were no God, we shouldhave to invent one. By contrast,contemporary philosophers say, accordingto Harvey COX, 5 "If Goddid exist, we should have to abolishHim." We have come a longway since the founding of this'nation and it has not all been uphill.If they did not always live upto the standards set by their ownconsciences, as in the case. ofslavery, they were still painfullyaware of their shortcomings. Theyalso believed in their accountabilityto the Judge of all the earth"God is not dead, nor doth hesleep," as Longfellow tells us inthe familiar Christmas carol.God's Law and Human FreedomA significant but little-knowndevelopment of the pre-Revolutionaryera was the abolition of slaveryin England. In 1765, the sameyear Blackstone began publicationof his Commentaries, an obscuregovernment clerk, Granville Sharp,met an injured slave on the streetsof London near the office of hisbrother, a kindly physician. Theslave had been severely beaten byhis master and cast out into the