The spirit of the old Testament which was prevalent among the early settlers of New England was perhaps still more manifest there at the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War of Independence. The ever-increasing antagonism which was aroused by the attempt of the Parliament of England to regulate and to tax the colonies, found expression in Biblical terms to an extent which can hardly be appreciated in the present time. The people in America had to fight over again the same battles for constitutional liberties which the English had fought before them, and George III., so far as his claims over the colonies were concerned, relied as much upon the kingly prerogative, the doctrine of “Divine Right,” as ever did James I. All of these pretensions, all the questions of right and liberty had to be re-argued. To refute this false theory of kingly power it was not only expedient but necessary to revert to the earliest times, to the most sacred record, the Old Testament, for illustration and for argument, chiefly because the doctrine of Divine Right of a King by the Grace of God and its corollaries, “unlimited submission and non-resistance,” were deduced, or rather distorted, from the New Testament, having been brought into the field of politics with the object of enslaving the masses through their religious creed. “It is, at least, an historical fact――says the historian Lecky――that in the great majority of instances the early Protestant defenders of civil liberty derived their political principles chiefly from the Old Testament, and the defenders of despotism from the New. The rebellions that were so frequent in Jewish history formed the favorite topic of the one, the unreserved submission inculcated by St. Paul, the other.”[11]