Government of God or Gods.

I deceive myself every day; but I suspect that all the nations who have cultivated the arts have lived under a theocracy. I always except the Chinese, who appear learned as soon as they became a nation. They were free from superstition directly China was a kingdom. It is a great pity, that having been raised so high at first, they should remain stationary at the degree they have so long occupied in the sciences. It would seem that they have received from nature an ample allowance of good sense, and a very small one of industry. Yet in other things their industry is displayed more than ours.

The Japanese, their neighbors, of whose origin I know nothing whatever — for whose origin do we know? — were incontestably governed by a theocracy. The earliest well-ascertained sovereigns were the “dairos,” the high priests of their gods; this theocracy is well established. These priests reigned despotically about eight hundred years. In the middle of our twelfth century it came to pass that a captain, an “imperator,” a “seogon,” shared their authority; and in our sixteenth century the captains seized the whole power, and kept it. The “dairos” have remained the heads of religion; they were kings — they are now only saints; they regulate festivals, they bestow sacred titles, but they cannot give a company of infantry.

The Brahmins in India possessed for a long time the theocratical power; that is to say, they held the sovereign authority in the name of Brahma, the son of God; and even in their present humble condition they still believe their character indelible. These are the two principal among the certain theocracies.

The priests of Chald?a, Persia, Syria, Ph?nicia, and Egypt, were so powerful, had so great a share in the government, and carried the censer so loftily above the sceptre, that empire may be said, among those nations, to have been divided between theocracy and royalty.

The government of Numa Pompilius was evidently theocratical. When a man says: “I give you laws furnished by the gods; it is not I, it is a god who speaks to you”— then it is God who is king, and he who talks thus is lieutenant-general.

Among all the Celtic nations who had only elective chiefs, and not kings, the Druids and their sorceries governed everything. But I cannot venture to give the name of theocracy to the anarchy of these savages.

The little Jewish nation does not deserve to be considered politically, except on account of the prodigious revolution that has occurred in the world, of which it was the very obscure and unconscious cause.

Do but consider the history of this strange people. They have a conductor who undertakes to guide them in the name of his God to Ph?nicia, which he calls Canaan. The way was direct and plain, from the country of Goshen as far as Tyre, from south to north; and there was no danger for six hundred and thirty thousand fighting men, having at their head a general like Moses, who, according to Flavius Josephus, had already vanquished an army of Ethiopians, and even an army of serpents.

Instead of taking this short and easy route, he conducts them from Rameses to Baal-Sephon, in an opposite directio............