The American Declaration of Independence electrified people around the world. The Declaration inflamed the hopes and dreams of millions who had NEVER thought that actually fighting back against tyranny was possible. The Declaration called out the tyrants and listed many of their crimes, and said in plain language that:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness

NO tyrant wants THOSE ideas let out of the bag, yet the Americans had done so, and backed their words up with a serious shooting-war Revolution against the most powerful nation on Earth.

Revolutions were nothing new, but the impact of this one was different . . . and, for many, almost sacred. A few months prior to the Declaration, Thomas Paine had published Common Sense, which included the assertion that "We have it in our power to begin the world over again."

From the Thomas Paine Society --"Paine's Common Sense made an irrefutable argument for separation from England and described the revolution as not only achievable but inevitable. Throughout the colonies letters to newspapers quoted Paine's words. 'Nothing else is talked of,' wrote Bostonian Andrew Elliot to a friend in London, '...I know not what can be done by Great Britain to prevent it.'

Paine described the compassionate yearning powering the world-wide interest in the Declaration with a searingly heart-felt passage:

O ye that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of the old world is overrun with oppression. Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia and Africa have long expelled her.—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind.

If the Great Awakening is anything, it is a continuation and expansion of the American Revolution and of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence, which have always been meant (if not always so described) as a project to free Mankind as a whole.