They Preached Liberty!

Years ago, D. James Kennedy sent me a book he published through Coral Ridge Ministries, by this title. He had made a passionate search of particular sermons preached throughout New England by virtually all the ministers of the period, from the 1700s through the period of the American Revolution and beyond. They were titled Election Sermons and Artillery Sermons. Of all the sermons preached in those early pulpits, these were the sermons printed out and most widely distributed among the American citizens. This one fact should give cause to look carefully at those sermons and discover that Liberty was of utmost importance to those ministers. Liberty impassioned the citizens who faced peril from the mother country.

In early America, Liberty came under fire as it does today. The Puritan clergy have been rightly called “The Watchmen on the Wall.” These men of God were the most highly educated in the entire community. Most of them had graduated from Harvard and Yale when these institutions were still solidly sound in orthodox Biblical theology. These remarkable men possessed skill not only in the Old Testament and in Reformation Theology, but also in other fields of knowledge upon a broad liberal education. Dr. Kennedy observed that these pastors were the primarily principals establishing the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1780.

These pastors revealed their passion for civil government and its Biblical ordering through their sermons. They deemed political subjects and admonitions most worthy subjects for the pulpit sermons. They delivered these sermons specifically to instruct the voter in insuring Liberty for our young nation.

Yes, of course, there were Tories who strongly objected to the Puritan views, but the ministers had their Biblical response: “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty,” and “You shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you free.”

They often referred to Hebrew History, which was held sacred to them. They could relate to the Hebrew children leaving the land of bondage and entering the Promise Land, and of course, to Moses receiving the Law.

Through intense study of the Hebrews, they understood that idolatry had been established in every nation of the world by the time God raised Moses up as a deliverer of His people. Moral and social evils reigned in those cultures. No constitution, such as we know in America, existed in any government in the world. And the Israelites, children of the man of God Abraham, had ceased to worship the One True God.

That One True God then used Moses to establish the means of a political religious constitution to insure Liberty, an idea of Providence in the mind of God. He would use the true religion to establish government, and then use that righteous government to protect the true religion. The Jewish lawgiver has given us the means to secure Liberty, which we can achieve in no other way. We can learn from Moses that the worship of the One True God must be the first Principle of Civil polity. Obviously, Satan’s objective is to destroy that idea in our pubic square.

Citizens guarding their “natural” rights must realize that righteous government, by compact or constitution, guards those rights for every man. God made a compact with Moses, Noah, and Joshua. We who must elect imperfect men to office must also accept the duty to limit their power and monitor their performance in office.

These early sermons’ greatest insight is the fact that Liberty is grounded in Scripture. Randall P. Cole, author of the book, They Preached Liberty, wrote of the Puritan ministers: “They wished to conserve the best from the past, including Magna Charta, and their own colonial charters. In their opinion, the real radicals were those in the British government who were departing from the laws and traditions of old. The clergy opposed what Samuel Langdon, D. D., President of Harvard College, called the many artifices to stretch the prerogatives of the crown beyond all constitutional bounds.”

Can you understand that in opposing and resisting tyranny, they merely defended the ancient Biblical liberties? These ministers defended political and civil liberty, they also stressed religious liberty. Religious liberty, in turn, they taught, completely depends on training in and action upon these ancient Truths. They America’s clergy faithfully pointed out the obligations and cost of liberty. Our forefathers fought a war to obtain it. My generation fought a war to preserve it (WWII). The fight continues.

Before the beginning of the American Revolution, the New England clergy pled the cause of the African slaves. In the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson denounced the British government for the slave trade. Lamentably, the colonies of South Carolina and Georgia succeeded in striking this element from the Declaration. Nonetheless, in these sermons, one reads that many of them strongly preached against slavery.

Meet Jonathan Mayhew (1729-1766)

Robert Treat Payne, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and later Attorney General for the United States, declared the New England minister Jonathan Mayhew, “The Father of Civil and Religious Liberty in Massachusetts and America.” The patriot statesmen of the day—including intimate friends James Otis, John Adams, and Samuel Adams—recognized Mayhew for his convictions, writings, and influence.

Twenty six years before the drafting of the Declaration, Mayhew proclaimed, “Nothing can well be imagined more directly contrary to common sense than to suppose that millions of people should be subjected to the arbitrary, precarious pleasure of a single man, – who has naturally no superiority over them in point of authority, – so that their estates, and everything that is valuable in life, and even their lives also, shall be absolutely at his disposal, if he happens to be wanton and capricious enough to demand them.”

In 1754, Mayhew’s Election Sermon included this challenge:

God forbid that any son of New England should prove such a profane Esau as to sell his birthright! Our ancestors, though not perfect and infallible in all respects, were a religious, brave, and virtuous set of men, whose love of liberty, civil and religious, brought them from their native land into the American deserts. By their generous care it is, under the smiles of a gracious providence, that we now have a goodly heritage.

In 1750, warning against unlimited submission, Mayhew declared,

Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality with it. It degrades men from their higher rank into the class of brutes. It dampens their spirits, it suppresses arts; it extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those enslaved by it; it makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little, and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity.

In no other country of World History has there been a government like ours. In early America, civil and religious liberty combined in harmony for a season. In Charles Turner’s Election Sermon of 1773, he warns the patriots, “Religious Liberty is so blended with civil, that if one fails, it is not expected that the other will continue.”

Ebenezer Bridge, in his Election Sermon of 1767, declares, “As to religion and religious privileges, what people in the whole world are so highly favored as our nation? We have the Gospel, the freest use and the fullest enjoyment of it.”

The fundamental principles of the Hebrew and the American Constitutions are prominently republican—meaning the suffrage of the people. A godly form of civil government places with confidence a great power in the people upon the assumption they are truly a people of the Judeo-Christian faith. This blessing places a great responsibility on the people of faith to read, research, and embrace our Christian History, if Liberty can indeed be preserved in our nation.

Mayhew declared in 1754, “Rulers derive their power from God, and are ordained to be his ministers for good,” an admonition and charge repeated and emphasized in many election sermons over decades by New England ministers to those elected to office.

To repeat, an evil force in our nation now exerts itself to tear down the authority of the Law of Moses, the original source of liberty in America. To preserve both religious and civil Liberty, please carefully re-read this article. Then follow up with action in the public square. Prayer is essential. Education, skill and action are as well. I pray that once more the ministers “Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land.”

God never gives men up to be slaves till they lose their national virtue, and abandon themselves to slavery.—Rev. Richard Salter of Mansfield, Connecticut, Election Sermons, 1768

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.James 1:22

And all thy children shall be taught of the Lord; and great shall be the peace of thy children.—Isaiah 54:13


Mrs. Ames is a lifelong educator and advocate for the faith of Jesus Christ and liberty under law. In 1965, with her husband’s help, she co-founded what would eventually become Emerald Mountain Christian School in Montgomery, Alabama. The associated Hoffman Educational Center and Emerald Mountain School continue to serve the community and nation.

The original of this article appeared in the Alabama Gazette, Montgomery, Alabama, July 1, 2016, Vol. 16 No. 10.  Content and information copyright 2016 The Alabama Gazette Publishing, LLC.

© 2016 Used by Permission


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