RELIGION AND SCIENCE. 9 



strict the functions of the State, there is reason to believe 

 that the ultimate political condition must be one in which 

 personal freedom is the greatest possible and governmental 

 power the least possible: that, namely, in which the free- 

 dom of each has no limit but the like freedom of all ; while 

 the sole governmental duty is the maintenance of this limit. 

 Here then in different times and places we find concern- 

 ing the origin, authority, and functions of government, 

 a great variety of opinions — opinions of which the leading 

 genera above indicated subdivide into countless species. 

 What now must be said about the truth or falsity of these 

 opinions? Save among a few barbarous tribes the notion 

 that a monarch is a god or demigod is regarded throughout 

 the world as an absurdity almost passing the bounds of 

 human credulity. In but few places does there survive a 

 vague notion that the ruler possesses any supernatural at- 

 tributes. Most civilized communities, which still admit the 

 divine right of governments, have long since repudiated the 

 divine right of kings. Elsewhere the belief that there is 

 anything sacred in legislative regulations is dying out : laws 

 are coming to be considered as conventional only. While 

 the extreme school holds that governments have neither in- 

 trinsic authority, nor can have authority given to them by 

 convention; but can possess authority only as the adminis- 

 trators of those moral principles deducible from the condi- 

 tions essential to social life. Of these various beliefs, with 

 their innumerable modifications, must we then say that some 

 one alone is wholly right and all the rest wholly wrong ; or 

 must we say that each of them contains truth more or less 

 completely disguised by errors? The latter alternative is 

 the one which analysis will force upon us. Ridiculous as 

 they may severally appear to those not educated under them, 

 every one of these doctrines has for its vital element the rec- 

 ognition of an unquestionable fact. Directly or by impli- 

 cation, each of them insists on a certain subordination of 

 individual actions to social requirements. There are wide 

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