To see the bounties of heaven destroyed, the beautiful face of nature laid waste, and the choicest works of creation and art tumbled into ruin, would fetch a curse from the soul of piety itself.
Paine describes the profound moral outrage that even a pious person would feel at the devastation wrought by conflict.
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Whether robbery shall be banished from courts, and wretchedness from countries?
The Parliaments on their part insisted that they had not only a right to remonstrate, but to reject; and on this ground they were always supported by the nation.
It was a sort of new form of government that insensibly served to put the old one out of sight and to unhinge it from the superstitious authority of antiquity.
To possess ourselves of a clear idea of what government is, or ought to be, we must trace it to its origin.