unprepared. The greatest power, the highest
wisdom, can only proceed one or two steps in advance of public opinion.
In all stages of civilization human nature, after all our efforts,
remains intractable,--not like clay in the hands of the potter, or
marble under the chisel of the sculptor. Great changes occur in the
history of nations, but they are brought about slowly, like the changes
in the frame of nature, upon which the puny arm of man hardly makes an
impression. And, speaking generally, the slowest growths, both in nature
and in politics, are the most permanent.

b. Whether the best form of the ideal is a person or a law may fairly be
doubted. The former is more akin to us: it clothes itself in poetry and
art, and appeals to reason more in the form of feeling: in the latter
there is less danger of allowing ourselves to be deluded by a figure
of speech. The ideal of the Greek state found an expression in the
deification of law: the ancient Stoic spoke of a wise man perfect in
virtue, who was fancifully said to be a king; but neither they nor Plato
had arrived at the conception of a person who was also a law. Nor is it
easy for the Christian to think of God as wisdom, truth, holiness, and
also as the wise, true, and holy one. He is always wanting to break
through the abstraction and interrupt the law, in order that he may
present to himself the more familiar image of a divine friend. While
the impersonal has too slender a hold upon the affections to be made the
basis of religion, the conception of a person on the other hand tends to
degenerate into a new kind of idolatry. Neither criticism nor experience
allows us to suppose that there are interferences with the laws of
nature; the idea is inconceivable to us and at variance with facts. The
philosopher or theologian who could realize to mankind that a person
is a law, that the higher rule has no exception, that goodness, like
knowledge, is also power, would breathe a new religious life into the
world.

c. Besides the imaginary rule of a philosopher or a God, the actual
forms of government have to be considered. In the infancy of political
science, men naturally ask whether the rule of the many or of the few is
to be preferred. If by 'the few' we mean 'the good' and by 'the many,'
'the bad,' there can be but one reply: 'The rule of one good man
is better than the rule of all the rest, if they are bad.' For, as
Heracleitus says, 'One is ten thousand if he be the bes