the right of the British Parliament to tax the Colonists.

Deeply religious by nature, having what Everett calls "a most
angelic voice," studying sacred music as an avocation, and
exhibiting through life the fineness of nerve and sensitiveness of
temperament which gave him his early disposition to escape the
storms of life by a career in the pulpit, circumstances, or rather
his sense of fitness, dominating his physical weakness, imposed on
him the work of leading in what results have shown to be the
greatest revolution of history. So sensitive, physically, that he
had "a tremulous motion of the head when speaking," his intellectual
force was such that he easily became a leader of popular opposition
to royal authority in New England. Unlike Jefferson in being a
fluent public speaker, he resembled him in being the intellectual
heir of Sidney and Locke. He showed very early in life the bent
which afterwards forced him, as it did the naturally timid and
retiring Jefferson, to take the leadership of the uneducated masses
of the people against the wealth, the culture, and the conservatism
of the colonial aristocracy.

After passing through the Lovell School he graduated at Harvard
College, and on proposing a thesis for his second degree, as college
custom required, he defended the proposition that "it is lawful to
resist the supreme authority, if the commonwealth cannot otherwise
be preserved." Like questions had been debated during the Middle
Ages from the time returning Crusaders brought back with them copies
of Aristotle and other great Greek philosophers whose authority was
still reverenced at Byzantium and Bagdad when London and Paris knew
nothing of them. Out of the denial of one set of schoolmen that a
divine right to rule, greater than that derived from the people,