On infidelity and authority of reason

"But it is necessary to the happiness of man, that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

    It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain, and in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can we
conceive any thing more destructive to morality than this?"


 "As it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed further into the subject, offer some other observations on the word revelation. Revelation, when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man.

    No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.

    It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication- after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself  obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him."

  (Thomas Paine, Age of Reason)

To argue with a person who has renounced the use and authority of reason, and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt,  is like administrering medicine to the dead, or endeavoring to convert an athiest by scripture.  --  It is the prerogative of animals.  And no man will envy you those honors, in which a savage only can be your rival, and a bear your master.

(Thomas Paine letter to Sir William Howell)

on loss of self government

Oliver Cromwell

…. “Free government is only for nations that deserve it; and they lose all right to it by licentiousness, no less than by servility.  If a nation cannot govern itself, it make comparatively little difference whether its inability springs from a slavish and craven distrust of its own power, or from a seer incapacity on the part of its citizens to exercise self-control and to act together.  Self-governing freemen must have the power to accept necessary compromises, to make necessary concessions, each sacrificing somewhat of prejudice and even of principle, and every group must show the necessary subordination of its particular interest to the interests of the community as a whole.  When the people will not or cannot work together; when they permit groups of extremists to decline to accept anything that does not coincide with their own extreme views; or when they let power slip from their hands through sheer supine indifference; then they have themselves chiefly to blame if the power is grasped by stronger hands.” ...(Biography of Oliver Cromwell, Theodore Roosevelt. P.189)

Theodore Roosevelt

This biography was published while he was Governor of New York. He later became 26th President of the United States, after the assassination of William McKinley.

Theodore Roosevelt is here commenting on the closer of the Long Parliament. 

A people who will not govern their own appetites.  
A people who will not recognize the truth of the opposing parties position.  
A people who will not self govern, ...
   ........ may lose their representative government.

When we are so convinced of the correctness of our own position and fail to see the truths in the opposing position we fail to come to a central position.  This central position can be the compromise sought.  This failure to compromise may lead to inaction. This inaction may allow stronger hands, like those of Cromwell, to grasp power.

The real tragedy at the death of the Long Parliament is Oliver Cromwell did seek for power , not for self aggrandizement,  but to build a a body of saints.  He sought to create a Christian Republic, a new Jerusalem.  He instead imposed a Puritan Empire,  an empire that did not last even half a generation.  

He name and cause remain an anathema to this day.

on the root cause of evil

However absurd the statement may appear to one who has not yet discovered the fact for himself,

the cause of every man's discomfort is

evil,

moral evil

• first of all, 
• evil in himself, his own sin, 
• his own wrongness, 
• his own unrightness; and then, 
• evil in those he loves:  (with this latter I have not now to deal;)

•  the only way to get rid of it,
•  is for the man to get rid of his own sin. 

No special sin may be recognizable as having caused this or that special physical discomfort (which may indeed have originated with some ancestor);

but evil in ourselves is the cause of its continuance,
the source of its necessity,
and the preventive of that patience which would soon take from it,

or at least blunt its sting.

........

 Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business--namely, his own character and conduct. 


Were it possible (an absurd supposition) that the world should thus be righted from the outside, it would yet be impossible for the man who had contributed to the work, remaining what he was, ever to enjoy the perfection of the result; himself not in tune with the organ he had tuned, he must imagine it still a distracted, jarring instrument. 


The philanthropist who regards the wrong as in the race, forgetting that the race is made up of conscious and wrong individuals, forgets also that wrong is always generated in and done by an individual;

George MacDonald

that the wrongness exists in the individual, 

and by him is passed over, 

as tendency, to the race; 

and that no evil can be cured in the race, 

except by its being cured in its individuals:

tendency is not absolute evil; 

it is there that it may be resisted, 

not yielded to.

There is no way of making three men right 
but by making right each one of the three;

but a cure in one man who repents and turns, 

is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race.

(George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel)

http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/14453/pg14453.txt