r, the Matter, Form, and Power of the Commonwealth,
Ecclesiastical and Civil,"--in which he denied that man is born a social
being, that government has any natural foundation, and, in a word, all
of what men now agree to be the first principles, and receive as axioms,
of social and civil science; and declared that man is a beast of prey, a
wolf, whose natural state is war, and that government is only a
contrivance of men for their own gain, a strong chain thrown over the
citizen,--organized, despotic, unprincipled power. To this faithless and
impious work, which at least did good by shocking the world and rallying
many of the best minds to develop and defend the true principles of
society and the state, he put a fit frontispiece, a picture of the vast
form of Leviathan, the Sovereign State, the Mortal God,--a gigantic
figure, like that of Giant Despair or the horrid shapes we have
sometimes seen pictured as brooding over the Valley of the Shadow of
Death,--a Titanic form, whose crowned head and mailed body fill the
background and rise above the distant hills and mountain-peaks in the
broad landscape which is spread out below, with fields, rivers, harbors,
cities, castles, churches, towns and villages, and ships upon the seas
and in the ports. Its body and limbs are made up of countless human
figures, of every class, all bending reverently toward the sovereign
head. Its arms stretch forward to the foreground. In one hand it holds a
magnificent crosier, in the other a mighty sword, which reach across and
cover the whole. It is surrounded with emblems of power, of which it is
the life and embodiment. In the front is a fortified city, with its
streets and gate, its cathedral rising high above all other structures,
surmounted by the cross, the flag flying from the forts, the sentinel on
the ramparts. Its fortresses seem to defy and command the whole empire
over which Leviathan predominates. To show more fully how all-pervading
and resistless is the power of this monster made of mortal men, and the
means and extent of its control in Church and State, to impress the
senses, the emblems of its spheres and its instruments are depicted
below. First is a castle on a rocky height, with the smoke rolling from
its battlements, from which a cannon has just been fired; opposite, a
church, with a figure holding the cross above its roof of faith; here a
coronet, opposite a mitre; here is a cannon, to thunder in civil war;
opposite are the