In her 1943 essay entitled ?The Humanitarian With the Guillotine,? Isabel Patterson wrote:

?Most of the harm in the world is done by good people, and not by accident, lapse, or omission. It is the result of their deliberate actions, long persevered in, which they hold to be motivated by high ideals toward virtuous ends? [I]n periods when millions are slaughtered, when torture is practiced, starvation enforced, oppression made a policy ... it must be at the behest of very many good people, and even by their direct action, for what they consider a worthy object.?

What Patterson described was the inevitable result of man's sin nature when coupled with political power. Jesus taught that there is none who is genuinely good save One. This is why Thomas Jefferson warned: ?In matters of power, let us hear no more of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution.?

When those metaphorical chains are broken, the literal chains of tyranny are quickly forged.

Let us stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free.