Justice & Law Quote by Charles Hodge

Order, not anarchy, is the quiet thesis smuggled into Hodge's sentence. Writing from the 19th-century American Presbyterian mainstream, Hodge is defending the Protestant Reformation against a familiar charge: that once you break Rome's authority, you unleash religious individualism, doctrinal chaos, and social unrest. His answer is to reframe the Reformers as "instruments in the hands of God" rather than political insurgents or mere academics. That phrase is doing heavy work: it relocates legitimacy from institutional hierarchy ("prelates") to providence, and it implies that the Reformation's authority is not up for renegotiation by private opinion.

The subtext is a warning aimed as much at Protestants as at Catholics. Hodge is not celebrating radical freedom of conscience as a blank check; he's policing its boundaries. By contrasting liberation from "bondage to prelates" with the specter of a "tumultuous multitude", he stakes out a middle way: anti-episcopal, anti-Roman, but also anti-democratic in the theological sense. "Every man was a law to himself" is a jab at sectarianism, revivalist excess, and the kind of voluntarist Christianity that was exploding in Hodge's America, where new movements could form overnight.

Rhetorically, the sentence works by conceding the drama of emancipation while denying the revolution's worst rumor. It reassures anxious readers: the Reformation was a disciplined rescue, not a permission slip. Freedom is real, Hodge implies, but it's tethered to confessional structure and shared doctrine, not the sovereignty of the religious self.