d system say, See what a superior people
you are now,--how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is
anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before
the Revolution of 1793. Well that would be on the whole true, thank God;
but what need is there to say it?

Let us keep our scorn for our own weaknesses, our blame for our own sins,
certain that we shall gain more instruction, though not more amusement,
by hunting out the good which is in anything than by hunting out its
evil. For me, true to that which I proposed in my last lecture, I have
chosen, not the worst, but the best despotism which I could find in
history, founded and ruled by a truly heroic personage, one whose name
has become a proverb and a legend, that so I might lift up your minds,
even by the contemplation of an old Eastern empire, to see that it, too,
could be a work and ordinance of God, and its hero the servant of the
Lord. For we are almost bound to call Cyrus, the founder of the Persian
Empire, by this august title for two reasons--First, because the Hebrew
Scriptures call him so; and next, because he proved himself to be such by
his actions and their consequences--at least in the eyes of those who
believe, as I do, in a far-seeing and far-reaching Providence, by which
all human history is--

Bound by gold chains unto the throne of God.

His work was very different from any that need be done, or can be done,
in these our days. But while we thank God that such work is now as
unnecessary as impossible; we may thank God likewise that, when such work
was necessary and possible, a man was raised up to do it; and to do it,
as all accounts assert, better, perhaps, than it had ever been done
before or since.

True, the old conquerors, who absorbed nation after nation, tribe after
tribe, and founded empires on their ruins, are now, I trust, about to be
replaced, throughout the world, as here and in Britain at home, by free
self-governed peoples--

The old order changeth, giving place to the new;
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

And that custom of conquest and empire and transplantation did more than
once corrupt the world. And yet in it, too, God may have more than once
fulfilled his own designs, as He did, if Scripture is to be believed, in
Cyrus, well surnamed the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire some
2,400 years ago. For these empi