Our Parish Church Author:Sabine Baring-Gould Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SERMON III. THE PORCH. II. ffibe acquires tsb of Romans xm. 7. " Render to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due ; custom to whom custom ; fea... more »r to whom fear; honour to whom honour." I Told you last Sunday about the Rights of Man; and I said that some Rights were natural and some were acquired. I spoke about the Natural Rights; and now I shall speak about the Acquired Rights. Mind you—man has all these rights from God, and he who sins against these rights sins against God. The second set of rights belong to man as a member of a civilized society, the first set belong to him merely as an individual. The Acquired Rights are— 18 9ur nrisl) Cdurdj i. The Right of Property. ii. The Right of Contract. in. The Right of Respect due to Position. Now I will explain these to you. i. The Right of Property means that every man has a right to hold as his own, and to freely use, temporal possessions, so far as he has received or acquired them without detriment to the rights of others, and without interference with his own duties to others. You must understand that the Right of Property is the one great right which raises civilized men above savages. Imagine the state of this island at a very early age, when the people who lived in it were mere savages. Sometimes when you are going over a new-ploughed field, or over a furzy down, you light upon little bits of flint shaped like arrow heads ; these were the weapons of the savage men who lived here. They killed hares and rabbits and birds with these flint arrows, and perhaps the only idea of property they had, was the idea that they had a right to eat those beasts they had killed. After a while, we do not know how and when, corn was introduced into the island, and then the savage men found that they...« less