reciprocally by each other. Whoever has formed in his heart the least vivid notion of God will not entertain the slightest doubt of this union of justice and of mercy in the divine essence. When, however, we speak of kings being the dispensers of divine justice, we mean it in quite a different sense from that in which, during the great immigration of the northern hordes of Asia, the barbarian conqueror proclaimed himself the scourge of God. By assuming this title he merely meant to terrify his adversaries by the thought of having to encounter in himself a fearful and destructive power of evil, whom, in order to chastise a degenerate world, the Almighty had permitted to do as he pleased and to let loose his fury on the nations of the earth. And phenomena of this kind are not confined to the period of the great migration; for the true notion of the representation of the divine Judge of the world by the supreme power in the state combines together with the sternest severity of justice, which in this respect is both wholesome and necessary, the greatest clemency--for where is there, or can there be, a clemency greater than the divine? But most especially does this idea imply that which is here pre-eminently requisite, and insists with a prominence proportionate to its great importance on the strictest conscientiousness in the discharge of the duties of this vicegerency. But the superior excellence of this idea over many other explanations of a similar kind, but laboring under the defect of extreme vagueness, consists even in this, that it comprises and inseparably combines those two important conditions, both that the supreme governor is responsible to God alone, and, as following therefrom, that he is unquestionably responsible to Him, and that it also determines in what sense and in what way he is so.