Daily Inspiration Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

Mayhew is doing something deceptively radical: he’s yanking political obedience out of the realm of religious reflex and placing it on a moral performance review. Writing as a clergyman, he doesn’t sound like a pamphleteer crashing the pulpit; he sounds like the pulpit itself re-reading the fine print. The key move is his surgical phrase “by virtue of any thing here laid down.” He’s anticipating a familiar weapon in the hands of power: Paul’s admonition in Romans 13 to submit to governing authorities. Mayhew doesn’t deny scripture; he denies the tyrant’s preferred interpretation of it.

The intent is practical, not abstract. “Common tyrants, and public oppressors” are not poetic villains; they’re categories meant to be recognized in real time, by ordinary listeners, in the texture of taxation, coercion, and unaccountable rule. By calling them “common,” he punctures the mystique of sovereignty. Tyranny isn’t an exceptional monster; it’s a recurring civic condition.

The subtext is a pastor giving his congregation permission to stop confusing quiet with righteousness. He offers a theological shield for political resistance: disobedience isn’t rebellion against God when authority has already rebelled against its purpose. That’s a destabilizing doctrine in an empire that leaned hard on sermons to keep order.

Context sharpens the edge. Pre-Revolutionary New England was steeped in the idea that legitimacy requires consent and justice, but those arguments carried special force when baptized. Mayhew’s line doesn’t merely bless dissent; it reframes obedience as conditional, and makes the tyrant the real lawbreaker.