after it has disappeared in name; and “such divinity doth hedge a king,” that even now, many, on first seeing one, feel a secret surprise at finding him an ordinary sample of humanity.  The sacredness attaching to royalty attaches afterwards to its appended institutions—­to legislatures, to laws.  Legal and illegal are synonymous with right and wrong; the authority of Parliament is held unlimited; and a lingering faith in governmental power continually generates unfounded hopes from its enactments.  Political scepticism, however, having destroyed the divine prestige of royalty, goes on ever increasing, and promises ultimately to reduce the State to a purely secular institution, whose regulations are limited in their sphere, and have no other authority than the general will.  Meanwhile, the religious control has been little by little separating itself from the civil, both in its essence and in its forms.  While from the God-king of the savage have arisen in one direction, secular rulers who, age by age, have been losing the sacred attributes men ascribed to them; there has arisen in another direction, the conception of a deity, who, at first human in all things, has been gradually losing human materiality, human form, human passions, human modes of action:  until now, anthropomorphism has become a reproach.

Along with this wide divergence in men’s ideas of the divine and civil ruler has been taking place a corresponding divergence in the codes of conduct respectively proceeding from them.  While the king was a deputy-god—­a governor such as the Jews looked for in the Messiah—­a governor considered, as the Czar still is, “our God upon Earth,”—­it, of course, followed that his commands were the supreme rules.  But as men ceased to believe in his supernatural origin and nature, his commands ceased to be the highest; and there arose a distinction between the regulations made by him, and the regulations handed down from the old god-kings, who were rendered ever more sacred by time and the accumulation of myths.  Hence came respectively, Law and Morality:  the one growing ever more concrete, the other more abstract; the authority of the one ever on the decrease, that of the other ever on the increase; originally the same, but now placed daily in more marked antagonism.

Simultaneously there has been going on a separation of the institutions administering these two codes of conduct.  While they were yet one, of course Church and State were one:  the king was arch-priest, not nominally, but really—­alike the giver of new commands and the chief interpreter of the old commands; and the deputy-priests coming out of his family were thus simply expounders of the dictates of their ancestry:  at first as recollected, and afterwards as ascertained by professed interviews with them.  This union—­which still existed practically during the middle ages, when the authority of kings was mixed up with the authority of the pope, when there were bishop-rulers having all the powers