The Political Sermons of Samuel Johnson
From Modern Age, 383-388
By Andrew Sandlin,
An ordained minister in the
Nicene Convenant Church and editor of the
Chalcedon Report and the Journal of Christian
Reconstruction.
The sustained popularity of eighteenth-century luminary Samuel Johnson derives primarily from his intelligent and witty conversation recorded in the classic biography by James Boswell; from the quaint, prejudiced definitions appearing in his English dictionary, the first of its kind; from his unique and sometimes condescending literary criticism; and from his sage, practical advice written in The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer. Johnson, though, wrote more than dictionary definitions, literary criticism, and practical essays. He was a leading poet of his generation, and an accomplished playwright. He even produced an edition of Shakespeare’s plays. But he was no ivory-tower scholar oblivious of the social and political issues of his day. His reputation as something of a political
progressive is partially deserved (he clamored for penal reform, but, conversely, disdained the cause of the Americancolonists). Donald Greene reminds us, nonetheless, that a simple formulaic description of Johnson’s political views does not do justice to their complexity and the complexity of the eighteenth century.
“ Although Johnson’s political writings are fascinating in themselves, they are not the exclusive source of his political views. In the canon of the somewhat less popular sermons which Johnson indited (at a cost!) for mainly one Anglican minister appear two distinctly political homilies that afford a unique perspective on Johnson’s deepest political convictions. We should not be surprised, in fact, that it is precisely Johnson’s religious views that undergird his political convictions. Boswell remarks
that after reading William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, ‘religion was the predominant object of[Johnson’s] thought.’ We may not expect that the political views of a man on whom religion sustained such a dominant influence would escape that influence.”
Johnson did not seem to hold that representative government or a balance of powers is a check on political rulers.He acknowledged and lamented, however, the reality of tyranny by political rulers:
“That the institutions of government owe their original, like other human actions, to the desire of happiness, is not to be denied; nor is it less generally allowed, that they have been perverted to very different ends from those which they were intended to promote. This is a truth, which it would be very superfluous to prove by authorities, or illustrate by examples.
Every page of history, whether sacred or profane, will furnish us abundantly with instances of rulers that have deviated from justice, and subjects that have forgotten their allegiance; of nations ruined by the tyranny of governours, and of governours overborne by the madness of the populace.”
Johnson perceived the necessity of a respectful reciprocity between rulers and citizens, and thus excoriated both tyranny and anarchy, each of which located at the extreme end of the pole human government:
“Thus have slavery and licentiousness succeeded one another, and anarchy despotick power alternately prevailed. Nor have communities suffered more, when they were exposed to the passions and caprices of one man, however cruel, ambitious, or insolent, than when all has been taken off the actions men by publick confusions, and every one left at full liberty to indulge his desires, and comply without fear of his wildest imaginations.”
Johnson recognizes prevention punishment of evil as the chief roles the civil magistrate: “That the end governments is the suppression, or is here expressed [in Proverbs 20:8] dissipation of evil, and that evil is only suppressed or dissipated by vigilance is universally admitted ...”
“That established property and inviolable freedom are the greatest political felicities, no man can be supposed likely to
deny. To depend on the will of another, to labour for that, of which arbitrary power can prohibit the enjoyment, is the state to
which the want of reason has subjected the brute. To be happy we must know our own rights; and we must know them to be
safe.”
The magistrate’s “authority checks the progress of vice, and assists the advancement of virtue, restrains the violence
of the oppressour, and asserts the cause of the injured” (253). Law is the means of implementing this ministerial
authority: “No man knows any one, except himself, whom he judges fit to be set free from the coercion of laws, and to be
abandoned entirely to his own choice. By this consideration have all civilized nations been induced to the enactions of
penal laws, laws by which every man’s danger becomes every man’s safety, and by which, though all are restrained, yet
all are benefited.
A chief theme of sermon 26, though, is that law must be equitable: if justice is to be preserved, punishments must be commensurate
with crimes. Johnson was far from holding the Rousseauan-and modern liberal-tenet that human institutions are the root of
societal evil. All to the contrary, he asserted that the source of evil is the human heart. In fact, the motivation for citizens to submit
themselves willingly to civil law is the awareness of human sinfulness:
As all government is power exerted by
few upon many, it is apparent, that nations
cannot be governed but by their
own consent. The first duty therefore of
subjects is obedience to the laws; such
obedience as is the effect, not of compulsion,
but of reverence, such as arises
from a conviction of the instability of
human virtue, and of the necessity of
some coercive power, which may restrain
the exorbitancies of passion, and check
the career of natural desires (258, 259).
Johnson avers, nonetheless, that the fulfillment of the role of the civil government in securing property, confirming
liberty, and extending commerce is insufficient to assure individual happiness. Against the secularization of what we
term nowadays “democratic capitalism,” he concludes that virtue must buttress freedom: “Liberty, if not regulated by
virtue, can be only license to do evil; and property, if not virtuously enjoyed, can only corrupt the possessor, and give
him the power to injure others. Trade may make us rich; but riches, without goodness, cannot make us happy” (254).
He is intent, indeed, to highlight the ineptitude of civil government and positive legislation to produce a just and
harmonious society apart from religion:
In political, as well as natural disorders,
the great errour of those who commonly
undertake, either cure or preservation,
is, that they rest in second causes, without
extending their search to the remote
and original sources of evil. They therefore
obviate the immediate evil, but leave
the destructive principle to operate again;
and have their work for ever to begin, like
the husbandman who mows down the
heads of noisome weeds, instead of pulling
up the roots .... The only uniform and
perpetual cause of publick happiness is
publick virtue. The effects of all other
things which are considered as advantages,
will be found causal and transitory (253).
Positive legislation is necessary to restrain overt evil but powerless to ensure a just society:
Human laws, however honestly instituted,
or however vigorously enforced, must be
limited in their effect, partly by our ignorance,
and partly by our weakness. Daily
experiences may convince us, that all the
avenues by which injury and oppression
may break in upon life, cannot be guarded
by positive prohibitions. Every man sees,
and every man feels, evils, which no law
can punish. And not only will there always
remain possibilities of guilt, which
legislative foresight cannot discover, but
the laws will be often violated by wicked
men, whose subtlety eludes detection,
and whom therefore vindictive justice
cannot bring within the reaches of punishment
(256) .... [The best laws may
strive in vain against radicated [deeply
rooted] wickedness (258).
Positive legislation is only partially successful,
for it cannot examine or alter the
state of the human heart.
There is a solution to the impotence
of civil government and positive legislation:
“These deficiencies in civil life can
be supplied only by religion” (256).
Accordingly, the first duty of a governor is to diffuse through the community a spirit of religion, to endeavor that a sense of divine
authority should prevail in all orders of men, and that the laws should be obeyed, in subordination to the universal
and unchangeable edicts of the Creatour and Ruler of the world (256, 257).
Even if individual freedom and economic prosperity could engender happiness and satisfaction, Johnson demonstrates
that civil government would be unfit to ensure them:
Let us, however, suppose that these external
goods have power which wisdom
cannot believe, and which experience
never could confirm; let us suppose that
riches and liberty could make us happy. It
then remains to be considered, how riches
and liberty can be secured. To this the
politician has a ready answer, that they
are to be secured by laws wisely formed,
and vigorously executed. But, as laws can
be made only by a small part of an extensive
empire, and must be executed part yet far smaller,
what shall protect against the laws themselves?
And shall we be certain, that they shall not made
without regard to the publick good,
or shall not be perverted to oppression
by the ministers of justice (254, 255)?
Thus, in all human affairs, when prudence and industry have done their utmost, work is left to be compleated by superior
agency; and in the security of peace, stability of possession, our policy must last call for help upon religion (256).
Nonetheless, the magistrate has his disposal means of eradicating many of the effects of evil, which foster additional
evil. Johnson therefore urges magistrate to destroy houses of vice, drunkenness, and prostitution: “Those
houses are the pitfalls of our youth, from which those that are once trepaned them rarely escape, [sic] they ought be demolished as the dens of savages
that prey upon mankind, and he shall contribute to suppress them have the satisfaction of breaking most fatal snares of vice .... If the weeds
are to be extirpated from the fields society, let not our governours be satisfied with lopping the shoots, let them penetrate to idleness the root of vice,
and remove the soil in which it chiefly flourishes” (284, 285).
Are the sentiments expressed Johnson’s sermons, by an admittedly prejudiced man in a prodemocratic, preindustrial, and pretechnological of any relevance to us moderns on verge a new millennium? In response we may recall the comment by C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to a new edition of “Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God”:
Every age has its own outlook. It is good at seeing certain
truths specially liable to make certain mistakes.
We all, therefore, need the books that correct the
characteristic mistakes of 386.
Not, of course, that there is
any magic about the past. People were no
cleverer then than they are now; they
made as many mistakes as we. But not the
same mistakes. They will not flatter us in
the errors we are already committing;
and their own errors, being now open
and palpable, will not endanger us. Two
heads are better than one, not because
either is infallible, but because they are
unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
We know, indeed, the mistakes of Johnson’s age (have they not been trumpeted in our hearing for nearly two centuries?):
religious and political oppression, social injustice, and enforced inequality. We are less inclined to acknowledge the
mistakes of our own age, which Johnson would clearly have observed and to which his writings provide almost prescient
witness.
For instance, Johnson knew, as many in our antinomian age do not, that unlimited individual freedom is as pernicious
as unlimited governmental authority. Our democratic moderns grasp the dangers inherent in the consolidation of power in
civil government and incessantly remind us of the tyrannies of Johnson’s age as representative of that consolidation of
power. They are less likely, however, to perceive the dangers posed by the consolidation of power in the hands of an
unrestrained and, especially, irreligious, populace. The scourge of state tyranny is rivalled only by that of social anarchy,
fueled by high-sounding theories of human rights unaccompanied by prudent recognition of human responsibility.
Johnson, too, saw that the deepest problems of human society derive from the depravity of the human heart. The
prime tenet of Enlightenment anthropology and consequently liberal social theory is that unjust social structures
must be dismantled to eradicate human misery. Johnson held just the opposite view: it is the human condition itself that
generates unjust social practices and must be tempered (it can never be eradicated) by the faithful practice of virtue springing
from Christianity.
A society without virtue is an evil society, no matter how it may conform to abstract patterns of egalitarianism
and human justice. It follows then, according to Johnson, that civil government cannot do everything. It cannot even do
the main things. It can secure property against molestation. lt can protect and promote measured individual freedom. It can encourage
virtue. But it cannot produce human happiness or satisfaction, both of which are effects of individual virtue. Virtue, in
turn, is the province of religion, specifically orthodox Christianity. Johnson would detect in modern womb-to-tomb government
an alternative religion. While Johnson constantly urged charity and benevolence, he held the individual, not the state,
responsible for charitable action. Society poses many problems, but religion and the virtue it engenders, not government,
must solve most of them. Government is not suited to religious ends. It can foster-but never replace-religion.
Indeed, without religion, it cannot be successful. A religious void, moreover, threatens government itself, for religion
is the safeguard against unjust and tyrannical laws. Far from the contemporary sentiment that religion exists as
functional to government and society, Johnson believed that society and government cannot exist without religion.
Johnson urges that it is in the interests of civil government to encourage ordered religious practice. Devotees ofmodern democracy would not eagerly hear this suggestion. The wall separating church and state-by which they increasingly mean separating the state from religion-is today inviolate. It has perhaps not occurred to them that there may be a connection between the most acute problems of modern society they lament and their refusal to accord religion a place in public life. Johnson was less optimistic . He held it was in the interests of government to foster religion, and as
A good Church of England man supported the state church. To those who object that state religion is an imposition on individual freedom, Johnson replies that the effects of a disestablishment of religion are more baneful than those of a limitation of individual freedom. Johnson knew that while government
cannot produce happiness, it can prevent evil. This means, today, pornography and other public vice.
Johnson (and no doubt the framers our own Constitution) would find merely crass but also pernicious modern interpretation of the First
Amendment to protect pornography blasphemy. Contrarily, Johnson would encourage the suppression of both, since
they rip at the very fabric of a virtuous society. The magistrate should indeed secure freedom, but not free actions which will eventually undermine society. This vision of politics undergirded religion is anathema, of course, to secular moderns, both liberal and libertarian,
the former of whose political goal absolute egalitarian justice and the of whose political ideal is maximum individual freedom. Both cannot conceive
what Johnson saw so clearly-the equality and freedom in the world are for naught if they are shorn of virtue, which is spawned by religion.
FOOTNOTES
1. Donald J. Greene, “Introduction,” in Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel
Johnson, ed., Donald J. Greene, Vol. 10, Political Writings (New Haven, 1979, xiii-xxxv.
2. For discussion and evaluation of Johnson’s sermons, see James Gray, Johnson S Sermons: A Study (Oxford,
1972); J. H. Hagstrum, “The Sermons of Samuel Johnson,”Modem Philology, February, 1943,255-266;
3.Thomas George Kass, “Samuel Johnson’s Sermons: Consolations for the Vacuity of Life,” Ph. D. dissertation,
Loyola University of Chicago, 1988,
4. Jordan P. Richman, “The Political Sermons of Johnson and Swift,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, New Rambler, 110:27-41, 1971.
5. Peter Andrew Sandlin, “The Soteriology of Samuel Johnson,” M. A. dissertation, University of South Africa, 1993.
6. William R. Siebenschuh, “On the Locus of Faith Johnson’s Sermons,”Studies in Burke and His Spring, 1976, 103-117. 3.
7. James Boswell, Life of Samue Johnson, U.D. (Chicago, 1952).
8. Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed., Jean Hagstrum and James Gray, xiv, Sermons (New Haven, 1978). Page numbers all citations from or references to the sermons appear in the text in parenthesis at the conclusion
of the citation or reference.
9. C. S. Lewis, God Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, 1970), 202. Emphasis in original.
10. See Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson:Ahyman’s Religion, Madison, Wisconsin, 1964), 101 ff. 388, Fall
From Modern Age, 383-388
By Andrew Sandlin,
An ordained minister in the
Nicene Convenant Church and editor of the
Chalcedon Report and the Journal of Christian
Reconstruction.
The sustained popularity of eighteenth-century luminary Samuel Johnson derives primarily from his intelligent and witty conversation recorded in the classic biography by James Boswell; from the quaint, prejudiced definitions appearing in his English dictionary, the first of its kind; from his unique and sometimes condescending literary criticism; and from his sage, practical advice written in The Rambler, The Idler, and The Adventurer. Johnson, though, wrote more than dictionary definitions, literary criticism, and practical essays. He was a leading poet of his generation, and an accomplished playwright. He even produced an edition of Shakespeare’s plays. But he was no ivory-tower scholar oblivious of the social and political issues of his day. His reputation as something of a political
progressive is partially deserved (he clamored for penal reform, but, conversely, disdained the cause of the Americancolonists). Donald Greene reminds us, nonetheless, that a simple formulaic description of Johnson’s political views does not do justice to their complexity and the complexity of the eighteenth century.
“ Although Johnson’s political writings are fascinating in themselves, they are not the exclusive source of his political views. In the canon of the somewhat less popular sermons which Johnson indited (at a cost!) for mainly one Anglican minister appear two distinctly political homilies that afford a unique perspective on Johnson’s deepest political convictions. We should not be surprised, in fact, that it is precisely Johnson’s religious views that undergird his political convictions. Boswell remarks
that after reading William Law’s A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, ‘religion was the predominant object of[Johnson’s] thought.’ We may not expect that the political views of a man on whom religion sustained such a dominant influence would escape that influence.”
Johnson did not seem to hold that representative government or a balance of powers is a check on political rulers.He acknowledged and lamented, however, the reality of tyranny by political rulers:
“That the institutions of government owe their original, like other human actions, to the desire of happiness, is not to be denied; nor is it less generally allowed, that they have been perverted to very different ends from those which they were intended to promote. This is a truth, which it would be very superfluous to prove by authorities, or illustrate by examples.
Every page of history, whether sacred or profane, will furnish us abundantly with instances of rulers that have deviated from justice, and subjects that have forgotten their allegiance; of nations ruined by the tyranny of governours, and of governours overborne by the madness of the populace.”
Johnson perceived the necessity of a respectful reciprocity between rulers and citizens, and thus excoriated both tyranny and anarchy, each of which located at the extreme end of the pole human government:
“Thus have slavery and licentiousness succeeded one another, and anarchy despotick power alternately prevailed. Nor have communities suffered more, when they were exposed to the passions and caprices of one man, however cruel, ambitious, or insolent, than when all has been taken off the actions men by publick confusions, and every one left at full liberty to indulge his desires, and comply without fear of his wildest imaginations.”
Johnson recognizes prevention punishment of evil as the chief roles the civil magistrate: “That the end governments is the suppression, or is here expressed [in Proverbs 20:8] dissipation of evil, and that evil is only suppressed or dissipated by vigilance is universally admitted ...”
“That established property and inviolable freedom are the greatest political felicities, no man can be supposed likely to
deny. To depend on the will of another, to labour for that, of which arbitrary power can prohibit the enjoyment, is the state to
which the want of reason has subjected the brute. To be happy we must know our own rights; and we must know them to be
safe.”
The magistrate’s “authority checks the progress of vice, and assists the advancement of virtue, restrains the violence
of the oppressour, and asserts the cause of the injured” (253). Law is the means of implementing this ministerial
authority: “No man knows any one, except himself, whom he judges fit to be set free from the coercion of laws, and to be
abandoned entirely to his own choice. By this consideration have all civilized nations been induced to the enactions of
penal laws, laws by which every man’s danger becomes every man’s safety, and by which, though all are restrained, yet
all are benefited.
A chief theme of sermon 26, though, is that law must be equitable: if justice is to be preserved, punishments must be commensurate
with crimes. Johnson was far from holding the Rousseauan-and modern liberal-tenet that human institutions are the root of
societal evil. All to the contrary, he asserted that the source of evil is the human heart. In fact, the motivation for citizens to submit
themselves willingly to civil law is the awareness of human sinfulness:
As all government is power exerted by
few upon many, it is apparent, that nations
cannot be governed but by their
own consent. The first duty therefore of
subjects is obedience to the laws; such
obedience as is the effect, not of compulsion,
but of reverence, such as arises
from a conviction of the instability of
human virtue, and of the necessity of
some coercive power, which may restrain
the exorbitancies of passion, and check
the career of natural desires (258, 259).
Johnson avers, nonetheless, that the fulfillment of the role of the civil government in securing property, confirming
liberty, and extending commerce is insufficient to assure individual happiness. Against the secularization of what we
term nowadays “democratic capitalism,” he concludes that virtue must buttress freedom: “Liberty, if not regulated by
virtue, can be only license to do evil; and property, if not virtuously enjoyed, can only corrupt the possessor, and give
him the power to injure others. Trade may make us rich; but riches, without goodness, cannot make us happy” (254).
He is intent, indeed, to highlight the ineptitude of civil government and positive legislation to produce a just and
harmonious society apart from religion:
In political, as well as natural disorders,
the great errour of those who commonly
undertake, either cure or preservation,
is, that they rest in second causes, without
extending their search to the remote
and original sources of evil. They therefore
obviate the immediate evil, but leave
the destructive principle to operate again;
and have their work for ever to begin, like
the husbandman who mows down the
heads of noisome weeds, instead of pulling
up the roots .... The only uniform and
perpetual cause of publick happiness is
publick virtue. The effects of all other
things which are considered as advantages,
will be found causal and transitory (253).
Positive legislation is necessary to restrain overt evil but powerless to ensure a just society:
Human laws, however honestly instituted,
or however vigorously enforced, must be
limited in their effect, partly by our ignorance,
and partly by our weakness. Daily
experiences may convince us, that all the
avenues by which injury and oppression
may break in upon life, cannot be guarded
by positive prohibitions. Every man sees,
and every man feels, evils, which no law
can punish. And not only will there always
remain possibilities of guilt, which
legislative foresight cannot discover, but
the laws will be often violated by wicked
men, whose subtlety eludes detection,
and whom therefore vindictive justice
cannot bring within the reaches of punishment
(256) .... [The best laws may
strive in vain against radicated [deeply
rooted] wickedness (258).
Positive legislation is only partially successful,
for it cannot examine or alter the
state of the human heart.
There is a solution to the impotence
of civil government and positive legislation:
“These deficiencies in civil life can
be supplied only by religion” (256).
Accordingly, the first duty of a governor is to diffuse through the community a spirit of religion, to endeavor that a sense of divine
authority should prevail in all orders of men, and that the laws should be obeyed, in subordination to the universal
and unchangeable edicts of the Creatour and Ruler of the world (256, 257).
Even if individual freedom and economic prosperity could engender happiness and satisfaction, Johnson demonstrates
that civil government would be unfit to ensure them:
Let us, however, suppose that these external
goods have power which wisdom
cannot believe, and which experience
never could confirm; let us suppose that
riches and liberty could make us happy. It
then remains to be considered, how riches
and liberty can be secured. To this the
politician has a ready answer, that they
are to be secured by laws wisely formed,
and vigorously executed. But, as laws can
be made only by a small part of an extensive
empire, and must be executed part yet far smaller,
what shall protect against the laws themselves?
And shall we be certain, that they shall not made
without regard to the publick good,
or shall not be perverted to oppression
by the ministers of justice (254, 255)?
Thus, in all human affairs, when prudence and industry have done their utmost, work is left to be compleated by superior
agency; and in the security of peace, stability of possession, our policy must last call for help upon religion (256).
Nonetheless, the magistrate has his disposal means of eradicating many of the effects of evil, which foster additional
evil. Johnson therefore urges magistrate to destroy houses of vice, drunkenness, and prostitution: “Those
houses are the pitfalls of our youth, from which those that are once trepaned them rarely escape, [sic] they ought be demolished as the dens of savages
that prey upon mankind, and he shall contribute to suppress them have the satisfaction of breaking most fatal snares of vice .... If the weeds
are to be extirpated from the fields society, let not our governours be satisfied with lopping the shoots, let them penetrate to idleness the root of vice,
and remove the soil in which it chiefly flourishes” (284, 285).
Are the sentiments expressed Johnson’s sermons, by an admittedly prejudiced man in a prodemocratic, preindustrial, and pretechnological of any relevance to us moderns on verge a new millennium? In response we may recall the comment by C. S. Lewis, in his introduction to a new edition of “Athanasius’s The Incarnation of the Word of God”:
Every age has its own outlook. It is good at seeing certain
truths specially liable to make certain mistakes.
We all, therefore, need the books that correct the
characteristic mistakes of 386.
Not, of course, that there is
any magic about the past. People were no
cleverer then than they are now; they
made as many mistakes as we. But not the
same mistakes. They will not flatter us in
the errors we are already committing;
and their own errors, being now open
and palpable, will not endanger us. Two
heads are better than one, not because
either is infallible, but because they are
unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.
We know, indeed, the mistakes of Johnson’s age (have they not been trumpeted in our hearing for nearly two centuries?):
religious and political oppression, social injustice, and enforced inequality. We are less inclined to acknowledge the
mistakes of our own age, which Johnson would clearly have observed and to which his writings provide almost prescient
witness.
For instance, Johnson knew, as many in our antinomian age do not, that unlimited individual freedom is as pernicious
as unlimited governmental authority. Our democratic moderns grasp the dangers inherent in the consolidation of power in
civil government and incessantly remind us of the tyrannies of Johnson’s age as representative of that consolidation of
power. They are less likely, however, to perceive the dangers posed by the consolidation of power in the hands of an
unrestrained and, especially, irreligious, populace. The scourge of state tyranny is rivalled only by that of social anarchy,
fueled by high-sounding theories of human rights unaccompanied by prudent recognition of human responsibility.
Johnson, too, saw that the deepest problems of human society derive from the depravity of the human heart. The
prime tenet of Enlightenment anthropology and consequently liberal social theory is that unjust social structures
must be dismantled to eradicate human misery. Johnson held just the opposite view: it is the human condition itself that
generates unjust social practices and must be tempered (it can never be eradicated) by the faithful practice of virtue springing
from Christianity.
A society without virtue is an evil society, no matter how it may conform to abstract patterns of egalitarianism
and human justice. It follows then, according to Johnson, that civil government cannot do everything. It cannot even do
the main things. It can secure property against molestation. lt can protect and promote measured individual freedom. It can encourage
virtue. But it cannot produce human happiness or satisfaction, both of which are effects of individual virtue. Virtue, in
turn, is the province of religion, specifically orthodox Christianity. Johnson would detect in modern womb-to-tomb government
an alternative religion. While Johnson constantly urged charity and benevolence, he held the individual, not the state,
responsible for charitable action. Society poses many problems, but religion and the virtue it engenders, not government,
must solve most of them. Government is not suited to religious ends. It can foster-but never replace-religion.
Indeed, without religion, it cannot be successful. A religious void, moreover, threatens government itself, for religion
is the safeguard against unjust and tyrannical laws. Far from the contemporary sentiment that religion exists as
functional to government and society, Johnson believed that society and government cannot exist without religion.
Johnson urges that it is in the interests of civil government to encourage ordered religious practice. Devotees ofmodern democracy would not eagerly hear this suggestion. The wall separating church and state-by which they increasingly mean separating the state from religion-is today inviolate. It has perhaps not occurred to them that there may be a connection between the most acute problems of modern society they lament and their refusal to accord religion a place in public life. Johnson was less optimistic . He held it was in the interests of government to foster religion, and as
A good Church of England man supported the state church. To those who object that state religion is an imposition on individual freedom, Johnson replies that the effects of a disestablishment of religion are more baneful than those of a limitation of individual freedom. Johnson knew that while government
cannot produce happiness, it can prevent evil. This means, today, pornography and other public vice.
Johnson (and no doubt the framers our own Constitution) would find merely crass but also pernicious modern interpretation of the First
Amendment to protect pornography blasphemy. Contrarily, Johnson would encourage the suppression of both, since
they rip at the very fabric of a virtuous society. The magistrate should indeed secure freedom, but not free actions which will eventually undermine society. This vision of politics undergirded religion is anathema, of course, to secular moderns, both liberal and libertarian,
the former of whose political goal absolute egalitarian justice and the of whose political ideal is maximum individual freedom. Both cannot conceive
what Johnson saw so clearly-the equality and freedom in the world are for naught if they are shorn of virtue, which is spawned by religion.
FOOTNOTES
1. Donald J. Greene, “Introduction,” in Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel
Johnson, ed., Donald J. Greene, Vol. 10, Political Writings (New Haven, 1979, xiii-xxxv.
2. For discussion and evaluation of Johnson’s sermons, see James Gray, Johnson S Sermons: A Study (Oxford,
1972); J. H. Hagstrum, “The Sermons of Samuel Johnson,”Modem Philology, February, 1943,255-266;
3.Thomas George Kass, “Samuel Johnson’s Sermons: Consolations for the Vacuity of Life,” Ph. D. dissertation,
Loyola University of Chicago, 1988,
4. Jordan P. Richman, “The Political Sermons of Johnson and Swift,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of New Mexico, New Rambler, 110:27-41, 1971.
5. Peter Andrew Sandlin, “The Soteriology of Samuel Johnson,” M. A. dissertation, University of South Africa, 1993.
6. William R. Siebenschuh, “On the Locus of Faith Johnson’s Sermons,”Studies in Burke and His Spring, 1976, 103-117. 3.
7. James Boswell, Life of Samue Johnson, U.D. (Chicago, 1952).
8. Samuel Johnson, The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, ed., Jean Hagstrum and James Gray, xiv, Sermons (New Haven, 1978). Page numbers all citations from or references to the sermons appear in the text in parenthesis at the conclusion
of the citation or reference.
9. C. S. Lewis, God Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics (Grand Rapids, 1970), 202. Emphasis in original.
10. See Maurice Quinlan, Samuel Johnson:Ahyman’s Religion, Madison, Wisconsin, 1964), 101 ff. 388, Fall
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