Overview
Governor Winthrop distinguishes between "natural liberty" (freedom to do anything, including evil) and "civil liberty" (freedom to do what is good and just under law). A foundational text for understanding ordered liberty.
Historical Context
The Setting: The Massachusetts Bay Colony was a Puritan experiment in godly government. But colonists still quarreled over authority. Who decides what's lawful?
The Crisis: Winthrop had intervened in a local militia dispute. Some colonists accused him of tyranny. He was impeached (one of the first in American history) and tried by the General Court.
The Acquittal: The court found him not guilty. But Winthrop wasn't satisfied with just winning. He wanted to teach something about the nature of authority and freedom.
The Argument: There are TWO kinds of liberty. "Natural liberty" - shared with beasts - is freedom to do whatever you want, good or evil. "Civil liberty" - the liberty of covenant - is freedom to do what is good under just authority. The first leads to chaos; the second to flourishing.
The Legacy: This distinction between liberty and license runs through American political thought. The Constitution doesn't promise freedom FROM all constraint, but freedom UNDER just law.
Full Text
There is a twofold liberty, natural (I mean as our nature is now corrupt) and civil or federal.
The first is common to man with beasts and other creatures. By this, man, as he stands in relation to man simply, hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incompatible and inconsistent with authority, and cannot endure the least restraint of the most just authority. The exercise and maintaining of this liberty makes men grow more evil, and in time to be worse than brute beasts: omnes sumus licentia deteriores. This is that great enemy of truth and peace, that wild beast, which all the ordinances of God are bent against, to restrain and subdue it.
The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal; it may also be termed moral, in reference to the covenant between God and man, in the moral law, and the politic covenants and constitutions, amongst men themselves. This liberty is the proper end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.
This liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard not only of your goods, but of your lives, if need be. Whatsoever crosseth this, is not authority, but a distemper thereof.
This liberty is maintained and exercised in a way of subjection to authority; it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free. The woman's own choice makes such a man her husband; yet being so chosen, he is her lord, and she is to be subject to him, yet in a way of liberty, not of bondage; and a true wife accounts her subjection her honor and freedom.