Montesquieu Quotes
We ought to be very cautious in the prosecution of magic and heresy. The attempt to put down these two crimes may be extremely perilous to liberty, and may be the origin of a number of petty acts of tyranny if the legislator be not on his guard; for as such an accusation does not bear directly on the overt acts of a citizen, but refers to the idea we entertain of his character.
Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat. The Spirit of Laws. Translated by Thomas Nugent, G. Bell and Sons, 1914, p. 201.
While the Visigoths had some very advanced legal principles, this law, quoted in its entirety is typical of the nations that were part of the Catholic world. The church and its doctrines were immune from any possible criticism, explicit or implicit. This is the most formalized and sophisticated compendium of laws of the so-called “barbaric peoples” of Europe. The compilation was in many ways a documentation of the traditional laws of the Visigoths that had evolved over hundreds of years.
Helen Keller was a remarkable woman who was blind and deaf, and yet she became a great orator and social reformer.
Despite this clear statement, later the Colonial legislature withdrew the franchise from Roman Catholics. See {624149}. Despite this temporary restriction of religious freedom, Rhode Island and Connecticut were far ahead of the other New England colonies in freedom of conscience.
This is a particularly interesting historical quotation because it succinctly gives a history of the various horrors of religious strife in British history—a history that was very well known to the American Founding Fathers and the general American Colonial population. This history was the major driver behind the public insistence for the Bill of Rights and the 1st Amendment which erected a wall of separation between church and state with government never favoring or abetting any particular religion.
Historically, when Christian Europe was torturing and butchering people over differences of religious opinion, Islam was for the time, in most places, a model of tolerance. Suhrawardy died before Islam degenerated into an intolerance that almost rivaled in brutality that of the Christians centuries ago. And while his statement about the invention and initiation of brutal intolerance is correct, he would be shocked at the behavior of 21st century Iran, Pakistan and some other Islamic nations who from a traditional Islamic perspective had degenerated.
William was a Catholic himself. Spain then controlled Holland.
He had whipped the crowd up into a feverish pitch until someone rushed the bound and tied blacksmith and stabbed him to death. He had only criticized Mathias for being too harsh and stern a leader.
John Witherspoon, a Presbyterian minister with evangelical sympathies, was one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, generally referred to as simply Montesquieu, was a French judge, man of letters, and political philosopher.
