About two decades before the French Revolution, another revolution began across the Atlantic: the American colonists rose up against British rule. The American Revolutionaries achieved a miracle, establishing the first enduring constitutional republic of the modern age. Both revolutions transformed Western civilization’s understanding of authority, man, and God—the American Revolution for good, but the French Revolution for ill. Kings and magistrates were not absolute sovereigns but ministers of a higher moral order, imperfect as they might have been. The American Revolution remained largely within the horizon of that inheritance, while the French Revolution deliberately broke from it.