“A hundred years ago French atheism gave the world the Jacobin theory of political rights. The Bible had been teaching mankind for three thousand years the great doctrine of men’s moral equality before the universal Father, the great basis of all free, just, and truly republican forms of civil society. Atheism now travestied this true doctrine by her mortal heresy of the absolute equality of men, asserting that every human being is naturally and inalienably entitled to every right, power, and prerogative in civil society which is allowed to any man or any class. The Bible taught a liberty which consists in each man’s unhindered privilege of having and doing just those things, and no others, to which he is rationally and morally entitled. Jacobinism taught the liberty of license—every man’s natural right to indulge his own absolute will; and it set up this fiendish caricature as the object of sacred worship for mankind. Now, democratic Protestantism in these United States has become so ignorant, so superficial and willful, that it confounds the true republicanism with this deadly heresy of Jacobinism. It has ceased to know a difference. Hence, when the atheistic doctrine begins to bear its natural fruits of license, insubordination, communism, and anarchy, this bastard democratic Protestantism does not know how to rebuke them. It has recognized the parents; how can it consistently condemn the children?”
R. L. Dabney
Attractions of Popery
http://www.spurgeon.org/~phil/dabney/popery.htm
