rds, these two kinds of authority, at first
complicated together as those of principal and agent, become slowly more
and more distinct. As experience accumulates, and ideas of causation
grow more precise, kings lose their supernatural attributes; and,
instead of God-king, become God-descended king, God-appointed king, the
Lord's anointed, the vicegerent of heaven, ruler reigning by Divine
right. The old theory, however, long clings to men in feeling, after it
has disappeared in name; and "such divinity doth hedge a king," that
even now, many, on first seeing one, feel a secret surprise at finding
him an ordinary sample of humanity. The sacredness attaching to royalty
attaches afterwards to its appended institutions--to legislatures, to
laws. Legal and illegal are synonymous with right and wrong; the
authority of Parliament is held unlimited; and a lingering faith in
governmental power continually generates unfounded hopes from its
enactments. Political scepticism, however, having destroyed the divine
_prestige_ of royalty, goes on ever increasing, and promises ultimately
to reduce the State to a purely secular institution, whose regulations
are limited in their sphere, and have no other authority than the
general will. Meanwhile, the religious control has been little by little
separating itself from the civil, both in its essence and in its forms.
While from the God-king of the savage have arisen in one direction,
secular rulers who, age by age, have been losing the sacred attributes
men ascribed to them; there has arisen in another direction, the
conception of a deity, who, at first human in all things, has been
gradually losing human materiality, human form, human passions, human
modes of action: until now, anthropomorphism has become a reproach.

Along with this wide divergence in men's ideas of the divine and civil
ruler has been taking place a corresponding divergence in the codes of
conduct respectively proceeding from them. While the king was a
deputy-god--a governor such as the Jews looked for in the Messiah--a
governor considered, as the Czar still is, "our God upon Earth,"--it, of
course, followed that his commands were the supreme rules. But as men
ceased to believe in his supernatural origin and nature, his commands
ceased to be the highest; and there arose a distinction between the
regulations made by him, and the regulations handed down from the old
god-kings, who were rendered ever more sacred by time and