Had man not fallen from the very first into dissension and discontent with himself and his fellows, with nature and with God, society would have stood in no need of a constraining force, or of the state to constrain it. For what else is the state but an armed neutrality for the preservation of peace--a sword of justice against wrong, whether from individuals or communities, a fortress and a bulwark against unjust attacks and the violence of war? And whence but from that only perfect system--the system of Christian truth and the first opening of revelation--can we derive the explanation of that which is but the propagation of the old evil and the primal curse? Does it not furnish, in the first wrong and the first fratricide, the historical derivation and origin of the state, accounting for it as the divinely-appointed protection against man’s inborn tendency to injustice? And if in any other history or tradition a tolerably clear and definite allusion to such ideas exist, it was, without doubt, originally derived from the same source. It is, however, as in my last Lecture I have already endeavored to show, in the second and new divine commencement of the human race that we are to look for the true sanction and foundation of the state; for it is in this renovation of mankind that their true intrinsic and higher peace was first proclaimed and offered to him. Not, however, perfect peace, for that is to be the fruit and reward of having “fought a good fight.”[58] Still it is, in the mean time, a sure and everlasting basis of future peace, and an ever-growing germ of tranquillity even in the present. Viewed in this light, then, every human peace which is not merely specious and pretended, but honestly intended, and in so far Christian, however imperfect and partial, forms, nevertheless, a step in the great scale of progression--an approximation and a preparation to that universal and all-embracing peace of God which is higher than all reason, and all the disputes which arise out of or about it.