g, a bad
government is a judgment; but the one as much as the other is ordained
of God, and is to be obeyed not only for fear but also for conscience
sake.

A fourth principle involved in the proposition that all power is of God
is, that the magistrate is invested with a divine right. He represents
God. His authority is derived from Him. There is a sense in which he
represents the people and derives from them his power; but in a far
higher sense he is the minister of God. To resist him is to resist God,
and "they that resist shall receive unto themselves damnation." Thus
saith the Scriptures. It need hardly be remarked that this principle
relates to the nature, and not to the extent, of the power of the
magistrate. It is as true of the lowest as of the highest; of a justice
of the peace as of the President of the United States; of a
constitutional monarch as of an absolute sovereign. The principle is
that the authority of rulers is divine, and not human, in its origin.
They exercise the power which belongs to them of divine right. The
reader, we trust, will not confound this doctrine with the old doctrine
of "the divine right of kings." The two things are as different as day
and night. We are not for reviving a defunct theory of civil government;
a theory which perished, at least among Anglo-Saxons, at the expulsion
of James II. from the throne of England. That monarch took it with him
into exile, and it lies entombed with the last of the Stuarts. According
to that theory God had established the monarchical form of government as
universally obligatory. There could not consistently with his law be any
other. The people had no more right to renounce that form of government
than the children of a family have to resolve themselves into a
democracy. In the second place, it assumed that God had determined the
law of succession as well as the form of government. The people could
not change the one any more than the other; or any more than children
could change their father, or a wife her husband. And thirdly, as a
necessary consequence of these principles, it inculcated in all cases
the duty of passive obedience. The king holding his office immediately
from God, held it entirely independent of the will of the people, and
his responsibility was to God alone. He could not forfeit his throne by
any injustice however flagrant. The people, if in any case they could
not obey, were obliged to submit; resistance or revolution was trea