CHAPTER XXIV

ECHOES OF THE REVOLUTION

Pittsfar& Pennsylvania.

THE American Revolution is ill-understood by
those who see in it nothing more than a successful
rising against the authority of the British Crown,
This may be all that is suggested by its military
progress, by the incidents in which it began
and ended, or by the utterances of a firebrand
like Samuel Adams—its meaning as a spectacle;
but the guiding minds, the mind of Jefferson
especially, were thinking of bigger things, and
these give it a different meaning as an historical
event. In essence and intention, as the American
Constitution clearly shows, the Revolution aimed
at curbing the excesses of political authority in
general, in much the same way as Luther's
doctrine of "the priesthood of the individual
believer " and the Reformation which followed
it were directed against the encroachments on
spiritual freedom by the ecclesiastical authority
of the Roman Church. The two revolutions,
indeed, have much in common, Jefferson's
doctrine of equal rights to life, liberty and the