tutions which Society needs, we
have simply to consider by what mode we may best provide for the normal
tendencies which ever have been and ever will be active in man. It is
not in our power to change these tendencies, nor to prevent their play.
But we may so order our social polity as to _assist_ their natural
drift, or to _obstruct_ it. In the one case, the affairs of the
community are conducted with harmony, and with the least possible
friction. In the other, they are discordant, and are forced to reach
their proximately proper adjustment through antagonism and struggle. It
is the difference between the ship which flies swiftly to her destined
port with favoring winds, fair skies, and peaceful seas, and one which
struggles wearily to her harbor through adverse gales and stormy waves,
battered, broken, and tempest tossed. The great mass of the people have
always looked to the more highly developed of their race for practical
guidance in the secular concerns of life, and for spiritual guidance in
religious things. That they have done so, and that the Church and the
State have been large factors in the sum of human progress, we shall
presently see. We shall also see brought out more distinctly and clearly
the fact, that the dominant classes in Society, whether the form of
Government be a Monarchy, an Oligarchy, or a Democracy, are, in the
main, and except, perhaps, in transitional epochs, the classes who
possess, in reality, superior capacities of the quality the age most
requires in its leaders.

In the earliest ages of the world, when brute force was regarded as the
highest attribute of greatness, the men of might, the renowned warriors,
the Nimrods and the Agamemnons, occupied the highest pinnacle of
Society, and received homage from their fellows as supreme men. Of their
age they were the supreme men. To our enlightened epoch, the fighting
heroes of the past are but brutal bullies a little above the level of
the animals whose powers and habits they so sedulously emulated. But if
we plant ourselves in thought back in that savage era, if we reflect
that its habits and instincts were almost wholly physical, that the
chief controlling powers of the time were the arm of might and
superstition, and if we ponder a moment upon the force of will, the
dauntless courage, the inexorable rigor, the terrible energy, the
ceaseless activity, and the gigantic personal strength which must have
combined in a single man to have enabled