on another.

It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of
life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I
esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking
and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing
divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable
error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a
"divine right" in people _called_ Kings. I say, Find me the true
_Konning_, King, or Able-man, and he _has_ a divine right over me. That
we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that all men were
ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is precisely the
healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after!
The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something of the
Pontiff in him,--guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has
its rise. This too is a true saying, That the _King_ is head of the
_Church_.--But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie
quiet on its bookshelves.

Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to
_seek_, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is
the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times
of revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks,
no longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled,
tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not
the French Revolution; that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It were
truer to say, the _beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in
the Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself
Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about
pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do
much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did _not_ now do:
here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward went ever
more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The
builder cast _away_ his plummet; said to himself, "What is gravitation?
Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not still sound strange to
many of us, the assertion that there _is_ a God's-truth in the business
of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an "expediency,"
diplomacy, one knows not what--!

From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled
_Papa_, you are no