Sickly Monarchy
Celebrating America's 250th all year long
Excerpted from Jane Hampton Cook’s devotional book: Stories of Faith & Courage from the Revolutionary War.
“Male and female are the distinctions of nature,” Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense. “But there is another and greater distinction for which no truly natural or religious reason can be assigned, and that is, the distinction of men into KINGS and SUBJECTS,” he concluded. And just as Paine unlocked the English constitution, so he also diagnosed the sickness of the monarchy.
Because the monarchy promoted idolatry in his view, Paine described kings “as the most prosperous invention [of] the devil.” Paine’s Common Sense was radical but not irrational. He turned to history and Scripture to show just how sick the institution of the monarchy really was.
“According to the scripture chronology,” Paine wrote, pointing out there were no kings in humanity’s early stages, “the heathens paid divine honors to their deceased kings, and the Christian world hath improved on the plan by doing the same to their living ones,” he wrote. Paine reminded his readers that for three thousand years after Moses’ death, the Israelites lived under “a kind of republic” administered by judges. “Kings they had none, and it was held sinful to acknowledge any being under that title but the Lord of Hosts,” he wrote.
He believed exalting one man over the rest was a violation of nature and Scripture, while explaining how Gideon and Samuel both opposed establishing a monarchy. When Gideon marched victoriously against the Midianites, the Jews wanted to make him king. He responded by saying, “The Lord shall rule over you.” Likewise, Samuel opposed choosing a king. He only did so after the Lord gave him permission because the nation of Israel had rejected his original system. Samuel warned the people that one day they would “cry out for relief from the king you have chosen, and the LORD will not answer you in that day” (1 Samuel 8:18).
Paine deftly interpreted a verse commonly used as a reason favoring rule by kings: “Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” (Mark 12:17 KJV).
Paine didn’t believe the verse applied to the patriots because the Israelites were not ruled by a monarchy at that time. Instead, they were “in a state of vassalage to the Romans.” He believed the monarchy’s “hereditary succession” was evil. “For all men being originally equals, no one by birth could have a right to set up his own family in perpetual preference to all others forever, and though himself might deserve some decent degree of honors of his contemporaries, yet his descendants might be far too unworthy to inherit them,” he wrote.
After a long discussion of the tempestuous history of the English monarchy, Paine wrote, “The nearer any government approaches to a republic the less business there is for a king.” Through Scripture, Thomas Paine used examples from the King of kings to show the fallacy of a system based on earthly kings.
PRAYER: You are my King of kings, the only Ruler of my heart. Keep me from elevating one person over another, because your love extends to everyone.
“Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them: ‘Any kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and a house divided against itself will fall’” (LUKE 11:17).
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