underived and indefeasible right of the people in their "own
native right and might." The people not being God, and being
only what philosophers call a second cause, they are and can be
sovereign only in a secondary and relative sense. It asserts the
divine origin of power, while democracy asserts its human origin.
But as, under the law of nature, all men are equal, or have equal
rights as men, one man has and can have in himself no right to
govern another; and as man is never absolutely his own, but
always and everywhere belongs to his Creator, it is clear that no
government originating in humanity alone can be a legitimate
government. Every such government is founded on the assumption
that man is God, which is a great mistake--is, in fact, the
fundamental sophism which underlies every error and every sin.

The divine origin of government, in the sense asserted by
Christian theologians, is never found distinctly set forth in the
political writings of the ancient Greek and Roman writers.
Gentile philosophy had lost the tradition of creation, as some
modern philosophers, in so-called Christian nations, are fast
losing it, and were as unable to explain the origin of government
as they were the origin of man himself.

Even Plato, the profoundest of all ancient philosophers, and the
most faithful to the traditionary wisdom of the race, lacks the
conception of creation, and never gets above that of generation
and formation. Things are produced by the Divine Being
impressing his own ideas, eternal in his own mind, on a
pre-existing matter, as a seal on wax. Aristotle teaches
substantially the same doctrine. Things eternally exist as
matter and form, and all the Divine Intelligence does, is to