here to say it?

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins,
certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement,
by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its
evil. I have chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could
find in history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose
name has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your
minds, even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that
it, too, could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant
of the Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the
Persian Empire, by this august title for two reasons--First, because the
Hebrew Scriptures call him so; the next, because he proved himself to be
such by his actions and their consequences--at least in the eyes of those
who believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by
which all human history is

Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.

His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done,
in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is now as
unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work
was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it: and to do it,
as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done
before or since.

True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after
tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be
replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free
self-governed peoples:

The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than
once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have more than once
fulfilled His own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in
Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some
2400 years ago. For these empires, it must be remembered, did at least
that which the Roman Empire did among a scattered number of savage
tribes, or separate little races, hating and murdering each other,
speaking different tongues, and worshipping different gods, and losing
utterly the sense of a common humanity, till they looked on the people
who dwelt in the next valley a