Justice & Law Quote by Ethan Allen

Allen’s line doesn’t just rage at religion; it weaponizes the Revolutionary era’s favorite moral technology: “nature and reason.” By casting priests as tyrants, he drags clergy out of the sanctuary and into the political arena, where power can be challenged, checked, and overthrown. “Tyranny” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s the same charge leveled at kings and parliaments, now aimed at a class that claims authority from God rather than from consent.

The specific intent is strategic: to frame clerical influence as inherently self-serving. Allen argues that priests have an “interest” in discrediting natural law because natural law is legible to ordinary people. If moral truth is accessible through reason, then the priestly monopoly on meaning collapses. So he imputes a motive: clergy must muddy the waters, replacing shared rational standards with “systems” that can’t be tested, only obeyed.

The subtext is pure Revolutionary suspicion of intermediaries. Just as colonial Americans bristled at distant rulers, Allen warns against a domestic ruling class that governs the mind. His phrasing implies a feedback loop: invalidate reason, and you can sell people on incompatible doctrines; sell people on doctrines, and you secure obedience.

Context matters: Allen wrote in a moment when Enlightenment deism and anti-establishment politics overlapped. This isn’t atheism so much as a bid to relocate moral authority from pulpit to public judgment. He’s insisting that a free republic can’t survive if its citizens outsource their conscience.