That the almighty Ruler retains both a right and an agency in the management of terrestrial governments, is undisputed by all who recognize his right and his agency in any thing. It is the atheist alone who would insulate the kingdoms of the earth from the kingdom of heaven. None would banish Jehovah from the smaller empires his providence has organized and sustained, but those who banish him from the universe his power has created. Thus atheism in philosophy is sole progenitor of atheism in politics; and it should not excite our surprise, that he who 'sees' _not_ 'God in clouds nor hears him in the wind,'--who beholds in the great things of the earth, the air and the sea, no footsteps of divine power, and no finger-prints of divine wisdom, should be equally blind concerning the progress of civil affairs, and should so have perverted his mind, and so tortured the moral sense which God gave him, as to believe, and to rejoice, that without God, kingdoms rise and fall, and that it is _not_ 'by him' that 'kings reign, and princes decree justice.' But with the atheist, that moral monster,'---- horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lumen ademptum,' we are not now concerned. We leave him to the darkness he has brought upon himself through his 'philosophy and vain deceit,' and to the enjoyment, if enjoyment it be, of his dreary cavern, more dreary than that of Polyphemus,--a godless world. We come to inquire, by way of preparation for the more direct prosecution of the object of this article, concerning the views entertained by the great mass of mankind who believe in the existence and providence of Jehovah, as to his particular connection with the subordinate governments on earth, and the station which it is his holy pleasure to occupy in their control and management. And here we find at once, wide and hurtful mistakes; occupying relatively, such is man's tendency to extremes, the position of antipodes. Some, overlooking the twofold agency, partly civil, partly ecclesiastical, by which the Most High promotes his own ends and the well being of his creatures, have resolved each into the other, making religion an affair of the state, and civil government a matter for ecclesiastical influence; producing in practice the unseemly compound, commonly called "church and state," but which might be more accurately characterized as the ruin of both.