forget
it?--'Revelations,' if not celestial, then infernal, will teach
us that God is; we shall then, if needful, discern without
difficulty that He has always been! The Dryasdust Philosophisms
and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical
and other, will have to survive for a while with the
Physiologists, as a memorable _Nightmare-Dream._ All this
haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's-head
Philosophies 'teaching by example' or otherwise, will one day
have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are,
'the Period of Ignorance.

If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-Century have taught
poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be
this as the essence of innumerable others: That Europe requires
a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to
exist. Huge French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbonisms
with their corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal
Louis-Philippisms: all this ought to be didactic! All this may
have taught us, That False Aristocracies are insupportable;
that No-Aristocracies, Liberty-and-Equalities are impossible;
that True Aristocracies are at once indispensable and not
easily attained.

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching
Class: these two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to
harmonise themselves, sometimes conjoined as one, and the King a
Pontiff-King:--there did no Society exist without these two vital
elements, there will none exist. It lies in the very nature of
man: you will visit no remotest village in the most republican
country of the world, where virtually or actually you do not find
these two powers at work. Man, little as he may suppose it, is
necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue
of this necessity; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He
obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver;
and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to
do it.

The Wiser, Braver: these, a Virtual Aristocracy everywhere and
everywhen, do in all Societies that reach any articulate shape,
develop themselves into a ruling class, an Actual Aristocracy,
with settled modes of operating, what are called laws and even
_private-laws_ or privileges, and so forth; very notable to look
upon in this world.--Aristocracy and Priesthood, we say, are
sometimes united. For indeed the Wiser and the Braver are
proper