however,
and more of the spirit of Christian fraternity in him than, for the sake
of absolutism, to become a Turk or a Russian; nay, from some passages in
the _Concordia_--a political journal, published by him and his friend
Adam Mueller, in 1820, and quoted by Mr Robertson--it would almost appear
that he would have preferred a monarchy limited by states, conceived in
the spirit of the middle ages, to the almost absolute form of monarchical
government, under whose protection he lived and lectured at Vienna. To
some such constitution as that which now exists in Sweden, for instance,
we think he would have had no objections. At the same time, it is certain
he gave great offence to the constitutional party in Germany, by the
anti-popular tone of his writings generally, more perhaps than by any
special absolutist abuses which he had publicly patronized. He was,
indeed, a decided enemy to the modern system of representative
constitutions, and popular checks; a king by divine right according to
the idea of our English nonjurors, was as necessary a corner-stone to his
political, as a pope by apostolical succession to his ecclesiastical
edifice. And as no confessed corruption of the church, represented as it
might be by the monstrous brutality of a Borgia, or the military madness
of a Julius, was, in his view, sufficient to authorize any hasty Luther
to make a profane bonfire of a papal bull; any hot Henry to usurp the
trade of manufacturing creeds; so no "sacred right of insurrection," no
unflinching patriotic opposition, no claim of rights, (by petitioners
having _swords_ in their hands,) are admissible in his system of a
Christian state. And as for the British constitution, and "the glorious
Revolution of 1688," this latter, indeed, is one of the best of a bad
kind, and that boasted constitution as an example of a house divided
against itself, and yet _not_ falling, is a perfect miracle of dynamical
art, a lucky accident of politics, scarcely to be looked for again in the
history of social development, much less to be eagerly sought after and
ignorantly imitated. Nay, rather, if we look at this boasted constitution
a little more narrowly, and instruct ourselves as to its practical
working, what do we see? "Historical experience, the great teacher of
political science, manifestly shows that in these dynamical states, which
exist by the cunningly devised balance and counter-balance of different
powers, what is called governing