”When Kings or rulers become blasphemers of God, oppressors and murderers of their subjects, they ought no more to be accounted Kings or lawful magistrates, but as private men to be examined, accused, condemned, and punished by the law of God…. When magistrates cease to do their duty, the people are as it were, without magistrates … If Princes do right and keep promise with you, then do you owe all humble obedience. If not ye are discharged from and your study ought to be in this case how ye may depose and punish according to law such rebels against God and oppressors of their country.”
Christopher Goodman
Puritan / Co-pastor with John Knox in GenevaHow Superior Powers ought to be obeyed of their subjects; and wherein they may lawfully by God’s word be disobeyed and resisted.
“The fanatic for Calvinism was a fanatic for liberty; and, in the moral warfare for freedom, his creed was his most faithful counselor and his never failing support. The Puritans … planted … the undying principles of democratic liberty.”
George Bancroft — Historian
History of the United States of America — Vol. 1 — pg. 464
“Obedience to God’s Laws by disobeying man’s wicked laws is commendable, but to disobey God for any duty to man is all together damnable.”
John Knox
“On the eve of the Revolution, John Adams asserted that the pulpits of heavily Presbyterian Philadelphia thundered and lightninged every Sunday against the foreign tyranny, which Jefferson described a Virginia in which ‘pulpit oratory ran like a shock of electricity through the whole colony.”
James H. Huston
Religion and the Founding of the American Republic — p. 42