The doctrine of the divine right of kings as understood in England in the seventeenth century, and still in some continental countries, was, as far as I can ascertain, invented by the early popes, not for the purpose of exalting the kings, but of enslaving them, and through them the nations. A king and his son's sons had divine 'right to govern wrong' not from God, but from the vicar of God and the successor of St. Peter, to whom God had given the dominion of the whole earth, and who had the right to anoint, or to depose, whomsoever he would. Even in these old laws, we see that new idea obtruding itself. 'The king's heart,' says one of them 'is in the hand of God.' That is a text of Scripture. What it was meant to mean, one cannot doubt, or by whom it was inserted. The 'Chancellor,' or whoever else transcribed those laws in Latin, was, of course, a cleric, priest or monk. From his hand comes the first hint of arbitrary power; the first small blot of a long dark stain of absolutism, which was to darken and deepen through centuries of tyranny and shame. But to plead the divine right of kings, in a country which has thrown off its allegiance to the pope, is to assert the conclusion of a syllogism, the major and minor premiss of which are both denied by the assertor. The arguments for such a right drawn from the Old Testament, which were common among the high-church party from James I. to James II. and the Nonjurors, are really too inconsequent to require more than a passing smile. How can you prove that a king has the power to make laws, from the history of the Jewish nation, when that very history represents it all through as bound by a primaeval and divinely revealed law, to which kings and people were alike subject? How can you prove that the eldest son's eldest son has a divine right to wear the crown as 'God's anointed,' when the very persons to whom that title is given are generally either not eldest sons, or not of royal race at all? The rule that the eldest son's eldest son should succeed, has been proved by experience to be in practice a most excellent one: but it rests, as in England, so in Lombardy, or Spain, or Frankreich of old time, simply upon the consent of the barons, and the will of the thing or parliament.