permanently progressive. We hold it doubtful if there ever existed what
M. Comte means by a theocracy. There was indeed no lack of societies in
which, the civil and penal law being supposed to have been divinely
revealed, the priests were its authorized interpreters. But this is the
case even in Mussulman countries, the extreme opposite of theocracy. By
a theocracy we understand to be meant, and we understand M. Comte to
mean, a society founded on caste, and in which the speculative,
necessarily identical with the priestly caste, has the temporal
government in its hands or under its control. We believe that no such
state of things ever existed in the societies commonly cited as
theocratic. There is no reason to think that in any of them, the king,
or chief of the government, was ever, unless by occasional usurpation,
a member of the priestly caste.[18] It was not so in Israel, even in the
time of the Judges; Jephtha, for example, was a Gileadite, of the tribe
of Manasseh, and a military captain, as all governors in such an age and
country needed to be. Priestly rulers only present themselves in two
anomalous cases, of which next to nothing is known: the Mikados of Japan
and the Grand Lamas of Thibet: in neither of which instances was the
general constitution of society one of caste, and in the latter of them
the priestly sovereignty is as nominal as it has become in the former.
India is the typical specimen of the institution of caste--the only case
in which we are certain that it ever really existed, for its existence
anywhere else is a matter of more or less probable inference in the
remote past. But in India, where the importance of the sacerdotal order
was greater than in any other recorded state of society, the king not
only was not a priest, but, consistently with the religious law, could
not be one: he belonged to a different caste. The Brahmins were invested
with an exalted character of sanctity, and an enormous amount of civil
privileges; the king was enjoined to have a council of Brahmin advisers;
but practically he took their advice or disregarded it exactly as he