The next foundation of monarchy is faith in ancient rights--in the heritage of ancestral customs and privileges, according to the several relations of the different classes of the state; and we should beware, in a monarchial government, not to touch or violate with an incautious hand, or change without necessity, hereditary rights and usages which time has consecrated, for such heedless changes shake the very foundations of the social edifice. When a monarchy is founded on a written contract (whether it be intended as a sort of treaty of peace, with some party aspiring to dominion in the state, or be only the successful experiment of some scientific theory of political rationalism), such a government, though it may preserve the outward form, has ceased in all essential points, to be a monarchy according to the old acceptation of the term. An absolute government, whatever shape it may assume, whether it take the form of republicanism, and adopt the rationalist principles of freedom and equality--principles which in the nature of things, and according to the very constitution of human reason, are almost ever inseparable from a spirit of progressive encroachment in foreign policy, (as is sufficiently proved by the inordinate ambition, the insatiable thirst of power which distinguished the great republics of antiquity, in proportion as they became more democratic, and more a prey to anarchy,) or whether the absolute government assume the lawless and illegitimate sway of a military despotism--such a government may indeed be established in a sort of equipoise, circumscribed within tolerably reasonable limits, and preserved at least in its physical existence by means of such a written compact as we have spoken of above. But the old Christian state--the state which is founded in faith and love--can be renovated and re-established; not by the mere dead letter of any theory, though it should contain nothing but the pure dogmatic truth--but by faith--by love--by the religious energy of all the great fundamental principles of moral life. END OF LECTURE VIII. LECTURE IX. Character of the Romans.--Sketch of their conquests.--On strict law, and the law of equity in its application to History, and according to the idea of divine justice.--Commencement of the Christian dispensation.