ple
collectively, not individually--the organic people, or people fixed to
a given territory, not the people as a mere population--the people in
the republican sense of the word nation, not in the barbaric or
despotic sense; and in deriving the sovereignty from God, from whom is
all power, and except from whom there is and can be no power, instead
of asserting it as the underived and indefeasible right of the people
in their "own native right and might." The people not being God, and
being only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense. It asserts the
divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin. But
as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal rights as
men, one man has and can have in himself no right to govern another;
and as man is never absolutely his own, but always and everywhere
belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no government originating in
humanity alone can be a legitimate government. Every such government
is founded on the assumption that man is God, which is a great
mistake--is, in fact, the fundamental sophism which underlies every
error and every sin.

The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by Christian
theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the political
writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers. Gentile philosophy had
lost the tradition of creation, as some modern philosophers, in
so-called Christian nations, are fast losing it, and were as unable to
explain the origin of government as they were the origin of man himself.

Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the most
faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the conception
of creation, and never gets above that of generation and formation.
Things are produced by the Divine Being impressing his own ideas,
eternal in his own mind, on a pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax.
Aristotle teaches substantially the same doctrine. Things eternally
exist as matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to
unite the form to the matter, and change it, as the schoolmen say, from
materia informis to materia formata. Even the Christian Platonists and
Peripatetics never as philosophers assert creation; they assert it,
indeed, but as theologians, as a fact of revelation, not as a fact of
science; and hence it is that their theology and their philosophy never
thoroughly har