70 MANNERS AND FASHION. 



Meanwhile, the religious control has been little by little 

 separating itself from the civil, both in its essence and in 

 its forms. While irom 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 

 cf a deity, who, at first human in all things, has been grad- 

 ually losing human materiahty, 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 ; origi- 

 nally the same, but now placed daily in more marked an- 

 tagonism. 



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 



