recognition of these rights by modern society is due to
Christianity: some say to the barbarians, who overthrew the Roman
empire; but this last opinion is not well founded. The barbarian
chiefs and nobles had no doubt a lively sense of personal freedom
and independence, but for themselves only. They had no
conception of personal freedom as a general or universal right,
and men never obtain universal principles by generalizing
particulars. They may give a general truth a particular
application, but not a particular truth--understood to be a
particular truth--a general or universal application. They are
too good logicians for that. The barbarian individual freedom
and personal independence was never generalized into the doctrine
of the rights of man, any more than the freedom of the master has
been generalized into the right of his slaves to be free. The
doctrine of individual freedom before the state is due to the
Christian religion, which asserts the dignity and worth of every
human soul, the accountability to God of each man for himself,
and lays it down as law for every one that God is to be obeyed
rather than men. The church practically denied the absolutism of
the state, and asserted for every man rights not held from the
state, in converting the empire to Christianity, in defiance of
the state authority, and the imperial edicts punishing with death
the profession of the Christian faith. In this she practically,
as well as theoretically, overthrew state absolutism, and infused
into modern society the doctrine that every individual, even the
lowest and meanest, has rights which the state neither confers
nor can abrogate; and it will only be by extinguishing in modern
society the Christian faith, and obliterating all traces of
Christian civilization, that state absolutism can be revived with
more than a partial and temporary success.