it is false
altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this world
is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction,
or else the violation of such, does look-out from all ruling and
obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral
between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims
obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is!
God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there
is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim
that one man makes upon another.

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of
life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these.
I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the
checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that, in short, there
is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more
despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than
that of a 'divine right' in people _called_ Kings. I say, Find me the
true _Koenning_, King, or Able-man, and he _has_ a divine right over
me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that
all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is
precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages,
seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever
something of the Pontiff in him,--guide of the spiritual, from which
all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the _King_
is head of the _Church_.--But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a
dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.

* * * * *

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to
_seek_, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is
the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of
Revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no
longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled,
tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not
the French Revolution; that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It were
truer to say, the _beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in the
Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself
Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about
pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money,