As for those other elective representatives already mentioned, it is only when they belong to a particular estate and corporation, and represent it, that they can promote the permanent interests of this organically constituted whole. For it is out of such organic members that the national existence gains its true, _i.e._, its historical development. But this is impossible whenever they are chosen by the individual votes of the entire population. Such a splitting of the whole political body, as it were, into its constituent atoms, is either in itself an elementary decomposition or must eventually lead to it. Even a republican constitution, if it be well and wisely ordered, will be based principally on corporations or organic division of estates, rather than on any principle of numerical majority and equality, which, taken as a general element, invariably proves, as history testifies, sooner or later, a positive source of anarchy. Not only would it be an exaggeration, but even a gross error, were we to regard the republican polity as excluded from the Christian principle, that all sovereignty is of God, or as irreconcilable with it and even as directly contradicting its spirit. On the contrary, the duty of obedience and the actual dependence on the existing and _de facto_ head of the state, is not less binding on all who, through the accident of birth or their own free choice and voluntary obligation, belong to such a community, than on the subjects of an hereditary monarchy. The utmost that can be safely asserted is, that the Christian state principally inclines to the latter form of polity, without, however, formally rejecting, or unconditionally excluding the former. Historical experience has shown this, and the whole of modern history will furnish abundant testimony to its truth. When the responsibility of the supreme political authority is in an endless circle shifted from point to point of a mere human sphere, then the sacred character of the divine foundation of the state exhibits itself with least distinctness. It is more immediately manifest in an hereditary monarchy, where, by a single point, as the first link which holds together the whole community, this responsibility is attached immediately to God and the divine justice, before whose tribunal it has alone to answer. And this more immediate manifestation forms the ground of that preponderating tendency and preference of the monarchical constitution by the Christian principle.