Politics & Power Quote by Charles Inglis

Inglis is doing something slyly political under the cover of clerical calm: universalizing obedience. By insisting that “this Duty” isn’t limited to any “one particular Form of Government,” he sidesteps the hottest question of his moment - whether loyalty is owed to the British Crown specifically - and reframes it as a timeless moral requirement. The maneuver matters. If duty attaches not to a king but to “all regular States, lawfully established,” then resistance stops being a debate about policy and becomes a problem of sin, disorder, and illegitimacy.

The key phrase is “lawfully established,” a velvet rope disguised as a definition. It sounds neutral but functions like a gatekeeping device: once a regime is labeled “regular” and “lawful,” subjects’ obligations are settled in advance. That collapses the moral space where revolutions try to argue: that legality can be corrupted, that authority can forfeit legitimacy, that conscience can outrank the state.

Context sharpens the intent. Inglis was a prominent Loyalist Anglican clergyman during the American Revolution, writing against the Patriot case for rebellion. His rhetoric borrows the Church’s aura of permanence to counter a political movement built on improvisation and rupture. The subtext is pastoral but prosecutorial: if you disobey established government, you are not merely choosing a side; you are defecting from the architecture that keeps society “regular” at all. It’s an argument designed less to persuade rebels than to steady the wavering - offering a clean moral rule in a time when legality itself was being renegotiated.