e judge, the head of the executive,
dispenser and fountain of law: but with no more power of making the law,
of breaking the law, or of arbitrarily depriving a man of his property,
than an English sovereign has now; and his power was quamdiu se bene
gesserit, and no longer, as history proves in every page.

The doctrine of the divine right of kings as understood in England in the
seventeenth century, and still in some continental countries, was, as far
as I can ascertain, invented by the early popes, not for the purpose of
exalting the kings, but of enslaving them, and through them the nations.
A king and his son's sons had divine 'right to govern wrong' not from
God, but from the vicar of God and the successor of St. Peter, to whom
God had given the dominion of the whole earth, and who had the right to
anoint, or to depose, whomsoever he would. Even in these old laws, we
see that new idea obtruding itself. 'The king's heart,' says one of them
'is in the hand of God.' That is a text of Scripture. What it was meant
to mean, one cannot doubt, or by whom it was inserted. The 'Chancellor,'
or whoever else transcribed those laws in Latin, was, of course, a
cleric, priest or monk. From his hand comes the first hint of arbitrary
power; the first small blot of a long dark stain of absolutism, which was
to darken and deepen through centuries of tyranny and shame.

But to plead the divine right of kings, in a country which has thrown off
its allegiance to the pope, is to assert the conclusion of a syllogism,
the major and minor premiss of which are both denied by the assertor. The
arguments for such a right drawn from the Old Testament, which were
common among the high-church party from James I. to James II. and the
Nonjurors, are really too inconsequent to require more than a passing
smile. How can you prove that a king has the power to make laws, from
the history of the Jewish nation, when that very history represents it
all through as bound by a primaeval and divinely revealed law, to which
kings and people were alike subject? How can you prove that the eldest
son's eldest son has a divine right to wear the crown as 'God's
anointed,' when the very persons to whom that title is given are
generally either not eldest sons, or not of royal race at all? The rule
that the eldest son's eldest son should succeed, has been proved by
experience to be in practice a most excellent one: but it rests, as in
England, so in Lombardy