The end aimed at has been good, laudable even, but
they forgot that freedom is possible only with authority that protects
it against license as well as against despotism, and that there can be
no progress where there is nothing that is not progressive. In civil
society two things are necessary--stability and movement. The human is
the element of movement, for in it are possibilities that can be only
successively actualized. But the element of stability can be found
only in the divine, in God, in whom there is no unactualized
possibility, who, therefore, is immovable, immutable, and eternal. The
doctrine that derives authority from God through the people, recognizes
in the state both of these elements, and provides alike for stability
and progress.

This doctrine is not mere theory; it simply states the real order of
things. It is not telling what ought to be, but what is in the real
order. It only asserts for civil government the relation to God which
nature herself holds to him, which the entire universe holds to the
Creator. Nothing in man, in nature, in the universe, is explicable
without the creative act of God, for nothing exists without that act.
That God "in the beginning created heaven and earth," is the first
principle of all science as of all existences, in politics no less than
in theology. God and creation comprise all that is or exists, and
creation, though distinguishable from God as the act from the actor, is
inseparable from him, "for in Him we live and move and have our being."
All creatures are joined to him by his creative act, and exist only as
through that act they participate of his being. Through that act he is
immanent as first cause in all creatures and in every act of every
creature. The creature deriving from his creative act can no more
continue to exist than it could begin to exist without it. It is as
bad philosophy as theology, to suppose that God created the universe,
endowed it with certain laws of development or activity, wound it up,
gave it a jog, set it agoing, and then left it to go of itself. It
cannot go of itself, because it does not exist of itself. It did not
merely not begin to exist, but it cannot continue to exist, without the
creative act. Old Epicurus was a sorry philosopher, or rather, no
philosopher at all. Providence is as necessary as creation, or rather,
Providence is only continuous creation, the creative act not suspended
or discontinued, or not passing