act,
denies all human government, and allows the people no voice in the
management of their own affairs, and gives no place for human activity.
It stands opposed to all republicanism, and makes power an hereditary
and indefeasible right, not a trust which he who holds it may forfeit,
and of which he may be deprived if he abuses it.

CHAPTER VI.

ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONCLUDED.

VI. The theory which derives the right of government from the direct
and express appointment of God is sometimes modified so as to mean that
civil authority is derived from God through the spiritual authority.
The patriarch combined in his person both authorities, and was in his
own household both priest and king, and so originally was in his own
tribe the chief, and in his kingdom the king. When the two offices
became separated is not known. In the time of Abraham they were still
united. Melchisedech, king of Salem, was both priest and king, and the
earliest historical records of kings present them as offering
sacrifices. Even the Roman emperor was Pontifex Maximus as well as
Imperator, but that was so not because the two offices were held to be
inseparable, but because they were both conferred on the same person by
the republic. In Egypt, in the time of Moses, the royal authority and
the priestly were separated and held by different persons. Moses, in
his legislation for his nation, separated them, and instituted a
sacerdotal order or caste. The heads of tribes and the heads of
families are, under his law, princes, but not priests, and the
priesthood is conferred on and restricted to his own tribe of Levi, and
more especially the family of his own brother Aaron.

The priestly office by its own nature is superior to the kingly, and in
all primitive nations with a separate, organized priesthood, whether a
true priesthood or a corrupt, the priest is held to be above the king,
elects or establishes the law by which is selected the temporal chief,
and inducts him into his office, as if he received his authority from
God through the priesthood. The Christian priesthood is not a caste,
and is transmitted by the election of grace, not as with the Israelites
and all sacerdotal nations, by natural Generation. Like Him whose
priests they are, Christian priests are priests after the order of
Melchisedech, who was without priestly descent, without father or
mother of the priestly line. But in being priests after the order of
Melchisede