The Declaration of Independence and our U.S. Constitution incorporate the wisdom of the ages. They are a gift to us from our Founding Fathers.
The Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas affirmed the right of subjects to depose a king "if, becoming a tyrant, he abuses the royal power." In this he anticipated the thinking of the 17th century English philosopher John Locke and of the American patriots who declared their independence from the British crown in 1776.
According to John Locke's Second Treatise of Civil Government, the authority of political power derives from a social contract agreed to voluntarily by free, equal, and independent men. That power loses its authority when, by violating this contract, it loses the consent of the parties thereto. Locke conceded that the people are generally reluctant to exercise this power to dissolve ineffective or oppressive governments: "Great mistakes in the ruling part, many wrong and inconvenient laws, and all the slips of human frailty will be borne by the people without mutiny or murmur. But if a long train of abuses, prevarications, and artifices, all tending the same way, make the design visible to the people, and they cannot but feel what they lie under and see whither they are going, it is not to be wondered that they should then rouse themselves and endeavor to put the rule into such hands which may secure to them the ends for which government was at first erected."
Locke went to great lengths to distinguish liberty from license and to demonstrate that law is the liberator, not the oppressor, of man. "Law, in its true notion, is not so much the limitation as the direction of a free and intelligent agent to his proper interest, and prescribes no farther than is for the general good of those under that law," said Locke. He argued that "the end of law is not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom," emphasizing that freedom is not, however, "a liberty for every man to do what he [pleases]."
The Declaration of Independence enumerated the abuses of royal power that the founding fathers considered sufficient to justify their renunciation of the king's sovereignty. There, and in the Preamble to the Constitution of the United States, they spelled out the principles that formed the foundation of their vision of a better world. Echoes of Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Locke can be heard in both documents. The Constitution with its Bill of Rights incorporates the wisdom of the ages. By protecting our God-given rights from the encroachment of government, we expand our freedom to pursue true happiness.
In this season of gift-giving, let us be grateful not only for the gifts that God has given us directly, but also for those that have come to us through the wisdom of our Founding Fathers. Let us pass these gifts on to our descendants in the hope that they too will share our vision of a better world.
