over from the creature and returning to
God.

Through the creative act man participates of God, and he can continue
to exist, act, or live only by participating through it of his divine
being. There is, therefore, something of divinity, so to speak, in
every creature, and therefore it is that God is worshipped in his works
without idolatry. But he creates substantial existences capable of
acting as second causes. Hence, in all living things there is in their
life a divine element and a natural element; in what is called human
life, there are the divine and the human, the divine as first and the
human as second cause, precisely what the doctrine of the great
Christian theologians assert to be the fact with all legitimate or real
government. Government cannot exist without the efficacious presence
of God any more than man himself, and men might as well attempt to
build up a world as to attempt to found a state without God. A
government founded on atheistical principles were less than a castle in
the air. It would have nothing to rest on, would not be even so much
as "the baseless fabric of a vision," and they who imagine that they
really do exclude God from their politics deceive themselves; for they
accept and use principles which, though they know it not, are God.
What they call abstract principles, or abstract forms of reason,
without which there were no logic, are not abstract, but the real,
living God himself. Hence government, like man himself, participates of
the divine being, and, derived from God through the people, it at the
same time participates of human reason and will, thus reconciling
authority with freedom, and stability with progress.

The people, holding their authority from God, hold it not as an
inherent right, but as a trust from Him, and are accountable to Him for
it. It is not their own. If it were their own they might do with it
as they pleased, and no one would have any right to call them to an
account; but holding it as a trust from God, they are under his law,
and bound to exercise it as that law prescribes. Civil rulers, holding
their authority from God through the people, are accountable for it
both to Him and to them. If they abuse it they are justiciable by the
people and punishable by God himself.

Here is the guaranty against tyranny, oppression, or bad government, or
what in modern times is called the responsibility of power. At the
same time the state is guarantied against