The Asiatic custom of deifying their earthly rulers by addressing them as King of Kings, Lord or Spanner [_Umspanner_] of Creation, the Effulgence of the Deity, and the like, have ever been and very naturally most repugnant to the moral sense of Christian Europe. The Christian notion and axiom, that all power is of God, is founded on a very definite idea and well-considered principle. And this principle is nothing less than this, that the supreme head of the state has to dispense the divine justice. And while this constitutes the peculiar dignity of his office, he is, in the exercise of this his highest function and authority, responsible to God alone. If, however, we should any where meet, either in the present times or the history of the past, with a state in which, by the principle of its constitutions, the nominal possessor of supreme authority and the executive is responsible to another body, then is the latter in fact the sovereign power, and not the former, which really is subordinate to the other. The Spartan constitution will serve to illustrate my meaning. Here, to judge by that strict definition of the sovereign authority and its peculiar character and distinctive criteria, it evidently lay in the Ephori rather than in the possessors of supreme executive power, who were called kings, and whose office was hereditary. The very fact that two kings reigned conjointly is of itself subversive of the very notion of sovereign power. But still more fatally was this undermined by their responsibility in certain cases to the censorship of the other Spartan magistracy. To the other ancient republics, whose constitution was based naturally enough on a very artificial division of powers, and the maintenance of a certain antagonism and accurate balance between them, our notion of a supreme and sovereign political authority is scarcely applicable. It is found far more fully expressed in a special character of inviolable sanctity and dignity attaching to certain judicial functions and magistracies, such as that of the Areopagus in Athens and of the censorship at Rome in the days of the Republic, than to the transitory tenure of the executive power, over which those judicial authorities possessed and exercised in certain cases a control. The proper and _de facto_, or personal division of power, is essentially a republican principle. In notion, however, or in idea, it is perfectly legitimate to make a distinction between the several functions and elements of the whole sovereign authority. Now, in such a case, the judicial power--the supreme judicial power we would emphatically say--is pre-eminently the characteristic sign and specific distinction of sovereignty, from which all its other prerogatives and properties are originally derived or flow from it as its necessary and natural consequences. The noble prerogative of pardon and mercy, for instance, is, as it were, the natural attribute of the supreme judicial power.