Articles — Self-Evident

The lesson of Worms was not the lesson Luther meant to give. He meant to defend the Word of God against a corrupt Church. He taught, instead, that no earthly authority is beyond the judgment of a conscience answerable to something higher — and that lesson, once learned, could not be confined to the Church.

The medieval centuries in which the inheritance traced in the first three installments of this series was put to immediate political and legal use. Athens had given the West reason and the idea of the mixed constitution. Jerusalem had given it the covenant and the conviction that even kings stand under a law above themselves. Rome had given it natural law and the architecture of a republic. The House of Wisdom had preserved and transmitted the Greek philosophical inheritance

This is the article in which the cross-civilizational character of the liberty tradition becomes unmistakable. The reader who insists on seeing the Founding as the product of one people, one continent, one faith, will find the historical record contradicts such insistence. The reader willing to follow the evidence will find an inheritance richer than any chauvinism could fit inside.

The men who designed the American constitutional order treated antiquity as a laboratory of political experiment — failed experiments, mostly, and one or two qualified successes — from which the principles of constitutional design could be empirically extracted.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.