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Show 32 LfBERTY AND SLAVERY. reign of terror be the reign of liberty? It is evident, we think, that Locke has been betrayed into no little inaccuracy and confusion of thought from not having distinguished between rights and liberty. The truth seems to be that, in a state of nature, we would possess rights, but we could not enjoy them. That is to say, notwithstanding all our rights, we should be destitute of freedom or liberty. Society interposes the strong arm of the law to protect our rights, to secure us in the enjoyment of them. She delivers us from the alarms, the dangers, and the violence of the natural state. lienee, under God, she is the mother of our peace and joy, by whose sovereign rnle anarchy is abolished and liberty established. Liberty and social law can never be dissevered. Liberty, robed in bw, and radiant with love, is one of the best gifts of God to man. But liberty, despoiled of law, is a wild, dark, fierce spirit of licentiousness, which tends "to uproar the universal peace." Hence it is a frightful error to regard the civil state or government as antagonistic to the natu"al liberty of mankind; for this is, indeed, the author of the very liberty we enjoy. Good government it is that restrains the elements of NATURE OF CIVIL LIBERTY. 33 tyranny and oppression, and introduces liberty mto the world. Good government it is that shuts out the reign of anarchy, and secures the dominion of equity and goodness. Tie who would spurn the restraints of law, then, by which pride, and envy, and hatred, and malice, ambition, and revenge, are kept within the sacred bounds of eternal justice-he, we say, is not the friend of human liberty. He would open the flood-gates of tyranny and oppression ; he would mar the harmony and extinguish the light of the world. Let no such man be tmsted. If the foregoing remarks be just, it would follow that the state of nature, as it is called, would be one of the most unnatural states in the world. We may conceive it to exist, for the sake of illustration or argument; but if it should actually e>dst, it would be at war with the law of nature itself. F..,- this requires, as we have seen, that men should unite together, and frame such laws as the general good demands. Not only the law, but the very necessities of nature, enjoin the institution of civil government. God himself has thus laid the foundations ~f civil society deep in the nature of man. |