Daily Inspiration Quote by Jonathan Mayhew

Allegiance, Mayhew implies, is not a moral reflex but a contract with terms - and those terms can be breached. Writing as an eighteenth-century New England clergyman, he turns the pulpit into a political lever, arguing that obedience to a sovereign is only righteous when it protects the community it claims to govern. If the crown becomes an engine of "slavery and misery", then loyalty stops being virtue and starts being complicity.

The sentence is built to trap passive subjects. Notice how he frames the choice: either withdraw allegiance or "join with the sovereign" in harm. Neutrality is denied; compliance is collaboration. That binary is the point. Mayhew is smuggling resistance into religious ethics, making disobedience feel less like rebellion and more like refusal to sin.

His most radical move is the word "indispensably". The sovereign is not an exalted father figure but an office with obligations. Even more bracing, the people share that obligation: "we ourselves, as well as our sovereign", are bound to secure the welfare of society. That distributes political responsibility downward, a quiet democratization before democracy is officially on the table.

This is pre-Revolution rhetoric sharpening into a theology of legitimate resistance. Mayhew anticipates the American argument that authority derives from public good, not inherited right. He offers colonists a moral escape hatch: to break with power can be framed not as betrayal, but as fidelity to the society power was supposed to serve.