monize, or at least are not shown to harmonize throughout.

Speaking generally, the ancient Gentile philosophers were pantheists,
and represented the universe either as God or as an emanation from God.
They had no proper conception of Providence, or the action of God in
nature through natural agencies, or as modern physicists say, natural
laws. If they recognized the action of divinity at all, it was a
supernatural or miraculous intervention of some god. They saw no
divine intervention in any thing naturally explicable, or explicable by
natural laws. Having no conception of the creative act, they could have
none of its immanence, or the active and efficacious presence of the
Creator in all his works, even in the action of second causes
themselves. Hence they could not assert the divine origin of
government, or civil authority, without supposing it supernaturally
founded, and excluding all human and natural agencies from its
institution. Their writings may be studied with advantage on the
constitution of the state, on the practical workings of different forms
of government, as well as on the practical administration of affairs,
but never on the origin of the state, and the real ground of its
authority.

The doctrine is derived from Christian theology, which teaches that
there is no power except from God, and enjoins civil obedience as a
religious duty. Conscience is accountable to God alone, and civil
government, if it had only a natural or human origin, could not bind
it. Yet Christianity makes the civil law, within its legitimate
sphere, as obligatory on conscience as the divine law itself, and no
man is blameless before God who is not blameless before the state. No
man performs faithfully his religious duties who neglects his civil
duties, and hence, the law of the church allows no one to retire from
the world and enter a religious order, who has duties that bind him or
her to the family or the state; though it is possible that the law is
not always strictly observed, and that individuals sometimes enter a
convent for the sake of getting rid of those duties, or the equally
important duty of taking care of themselves. But by asserting the
divine origin of government, Christianity consecrates civil authority,
clothes it with a religious character, and makes civil disobedience,
sedition, insurrection, rebellion, revolution, civil turbulence of any
sort or degree, sins against God as well as crimes against the st