Enemies of colonial independence relied on the divine authority of governments. John Lind, an English barrister, refuted the Declaration in a 1776 pamphlet. Lind pointed out that the Declaration does not, indeed cannot, rely on “any law of God”: What difference these acute legislators suppose between laws of Nature, and of Nature’s God, is more than I can take upon me to determine, or even to guess. If to what they now demand they were entitled by any law of God, they had only to produce that law, and all controversy was at an end. Instead of this, what do they produce? What they call
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