wgiver but God, whose highest aim in politics was
to restore the original purity of the constitution, and to make its
government conform to the ideal type that was hallowed by the sanctions
of heaven. The inspired men who rose in unfailing succession to prophesy
against the usurper and the tyrant, constantly proclaimed that the laws,
which were divine, were paramount over sinful rulers, and appealed from
the established authorities, from the king, the priests, and the princes
of the people, to the healing forces that slept in the uncorrupted
consciences of the masses. Thus the example of the Hebrew nation laid
down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won--the doctrine
of national tradition and the doctrine of the higher law; the principle
that a constitution grows from a root, by process of development, and
not of essential change; and the principle that all political
authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was
not made by man. The operation of these principles, in unison, or in
antagonism, occupies the whole of the space we are going over together.

The conflict between liberty under divine authority and the absolutism
of human authorities ended disastrously. In the year 622 a supreme
effort was made at Jerusalem to reform and preserve the State. The High
Priest produced from the temple of Jehovah the book of the deserted and
forgotten Law, and both king and people bound themselves by solemn oaths
to observe it. But that early example of limited monarchy and of the
supremacy of law neither lasted nor spread; and the forces by which
freedom has conquered must be sought elsewhere. In the very year 586, in
which the flood of Asiatic despotism closed over the city which had
been, and was destined again to be, the sanctuary of freedom in the
East, a new home was prepared for it in the West, where, guarded by the
sea and the mountains, and by valiant hearts, that stately plant was
reared under whose shade we dwell, and which is extending its invincible
arms so slowly and yet so surely over the civilised world.

According to a famous saying of the most famous authoress of the
Continent, liberty is ancient, and it is despotism that is new. It has
been the pride of recent historians to vindicate the truth of that
maxim. The heroic age of Greece confirms it, and it is still more
conspicuously true of Teutonic Europe. Wherever we can trace the earlier
life of the Aryan nations we discover ge