Education Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

“Let us all learn to be free, and to be loyal” is the kind of tidy moral pairing that, in Jonathan Mayhew’s hands, smuggles a political grenade into the pulpit. As an 18th-century New England clergyman, Mayhew isn’t pitching freedom as personal vibe or private license; he’s training a congregation to treat liberty as a discipline, something practiced and argued for, not merely desired. The verb matters: learn. Freedom here is civic literacy, a habit of judgment.

The second half is the bait and the switch. “Loyal” sounds like obedience to crown and hierarchy, the language of sermons meant to keep social order intact. Mayhew’s subtext is sharper: loyalty is owed to principles and the public good, not to any particular ruler who violates them. In the ferment leading up to the American Revolution, that distinction wasn’t rhetorical decoration; it was a way to make resistance legible as virtue rather than sedition.

What makes the line work is its refusal to let “freedom” float free of responsibility. Mayhew anticipates the classic smear that liberty produces chaos, then preempts it by stapling freedom to loyalty - redefining loyalty so it can’t be monopolized by power. He offers a blueprint for dissent that still sounds respectable: you can challenge authority while claiming the high ground of fidelity. It’s a sermon sentence with courtroom strategy, converting protest into piety and making rebellion sound like moral maturity.