"Divine right" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "Kingship by Divine Right"—is quite a development of a Kingship that originated in foreclosure proceedings, when Prussia was taken for a debt by the crafty, ...
— Face to Face with Kaiserism • James W. Gerard
... with, much less for, his passengers,—thinks it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die for him? Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment;—not a man of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer;—not with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin
... when she had queened it over her playmates because her yellow curls were longer than theirs, her cheeks pinker, her eyes brighter and her slim, strong body taller. Fanny had never been compelled to stoop from her graceful height to secure masculine attention. It had been hers by a sort of divine right. She had not been at all surprised when the handsome young minister had looked at her twice, thrice, to every other girl's once, nor when he had singled her out from the others in the various social ...
— An Alabaster Box • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman and Florence Morse Kingsley
... misery like the rest of us. There is no "sacred privilege that doth hedge about a king" in the British Empire, and King George is respected among us for his manliness, and we cheered him sincerely when he twice visited us in the trenches, for we do not believe to-day in the divine right of kings, neither do we believe in the divine right ...
— "Over There" with the Australians • R. Hugh Knyvett
... settled down upon the largest bowlder of them all in the exact center of that side of the amphitheater which is reserved for the dominant race. Here she squatted, a most repulsive and uninteresting queen; though doubtless quite as well assured of her beauty and divine right to rule as the proudest monarch ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... sheer brute force is to rule the world, it will not be worth living in. If German bureaucratic brute force could conquer Europe, presently it would try to conquer the United States; and we should all go back to the era of war as man's chief industry and back to the domination of kings by divine right. It seems to me, therefore, that the Hohenzollern idea must perish—be utterly strangled in the ...
— The Life and Letters of Walter H. Page, Volume I • Burton J. Hendrick
... founded on Divine right? This you deny. Is not the proper question for you to discuss, then, not whether the Papacy be or be not compatible with republican government, but whether it be or be not founded in Divine right? If the Papacy be founded in Divine right, it is supreme over whatever is founded only in human right, and then your institutions should be made to harmonize with it: not it with your institutions!!! The real question, then, is not the compatibility ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow
... think our people have been more inclined than ever before to pause and contemplate how big with events is the history of this land. It was developed by people who believed not in the "divine right of kings," but in the divine right of human liberty. If we may judge the future progress of this land by its progress in the past, it does not require that one should be endowed with prophetic vision to predict ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... world, run through all these quotations, even the earliest. But the particular value of this book at the moment is its reminder that twice already has the House of Hohenzollern humbly pledged its All-Highest word to give constitutional government, only to resume "divine right" at the earliest convenient moment. Ruling Germany, and as much else as possible, with a view to the glorification of one's personal family and one's personal God, must be an exhausting labour, and once again the head of the dynasty is afforded an opportunity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various
... literally dwelt upon. We have found a grateful oil to pour upon any rising waters of ill conscience in reflecting upon the beneficent adjustment of social relationships by a wise Providence and the divine right of money-kings. ...
— The First Soprano • Mary Hitchcock
... between these two principles—right and wrong—throughout the world. They are the two principles that have stood face to face from the beginning of time; and will ever continue to struggle. The one is the common right of humanity and the other the divine right of kings. It is the same principle, in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You work and toil and earn bread, and I'll eat it." No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks ...
— Abraham Lincoln, A History, Volume 2 • John George Nicolay and John Hay
... unthinking mobs, blind to their own interests and utterly incapable of working out their own good. It was evident that he regarded Russia as representing among the nations the idea of Heaven-given and church-anointed authority, as the empire destined to save the principle of divine right and the rule of ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... would seem to impugn the legality of the whole series of transactions which placed William and Mary on the throne. The admission of an indefeasible right of the heir-apparent would have borne a perilous resemblance to a recognition of that divine right, every pretension to which the Revolution of 1688 had extinguished. If, again, as Fox and his followers at one time endeavored to argue, the Houses in 1789 had no right to the name or power of a Parliament, because the King had no ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... It was the idea working in the world, and the weight of the scorn was beginning to crumple his soul; for this idea that the people were thinking was finding its way into newspapers, magazines, and books. They were beginning to question the divine right of wealth to rule, because it was wealth—an idea that Barclay could not comprehend even vaguely. The term honest wealth, which was creeping into respectable periodicals, was exceedingly annoying to him. For the very presence of the term seemed to indicate that there was such ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White
... we will about democracy, but when a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple. He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old fabrication about the divine right of kings. But I can see that he is often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in his decrees. More and more often, of late, I've observed the boy studying his father, studying him with an impersonal and critical eye. And this habit of silent appraisal is plainly ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer
... to say nothing, but I can think what I please, you know, Mr. Helstone, both about France and England; and about revolutions, and regicides, and restorations in general; and about the divine right of kings, which you often stickle for in your sermons, and the duty of non-resistance, and the sanity of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... a crown in his hand. By some ingenious mechanism, this angel was made to extend his arm to the king, as if in the act of offering him the crown. This was a symbol representing the idea often inculcated in those days, that the right of the king to reign was a divine right, as if the crown were placed upon his head ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott
... declared, that its repose is impossible, whilst a free press and free institutions exist any where. Formerly the absolutists adhered to the principle of "legitimacy," or, the Divine right of an hereditary dynasty; and provided this false principle was respected, they did not object to the development of constitutions which preserved attachment to monarchies. But now they have thrown away their own principle of dynastical ...
— Select Speeches of Kossuth • Kossuth
... your uncle and—for instance—Monsieur des Barres? Does not true patriotism lead a man to think of his country's good and glory, not of the advantage of one special family? Your uncle can hardly believe in that mediaeval fiction of divine right, I suppose?" ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price
... spring into existence to carry on a splendidly paying trade—a trade, too, having untold fascination for the Yankees, while the average Irishman, as everybody knows, is a smuggler by nature, disposition, heredity, and divine right. It was also pointed out that, whereas huge quantities of spirits now pass to Ireland through the ports of Bristol and London, under the new dispensation Irish merchants would order direct, which would inflict loss on England. The details of this loss were fully explained, but I ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... only one of many attributes that might be predicated. We may say, That the whole is greater than its part, is an axiom in mathematics: That the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father alone, is a tenet of the Greek Church: The doctrine of the divine right of kings was renounced by Parliament at the Revolution: The infallibility of the Pope has no countenance from Scripture. In all these cases the subject of the predication is an entire proposition. That which these different predicates are affirmed of, is the proposition, "the whole is ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... for them. A certain person is a disgrace to the church of which he pretends to be a servant. Where does he find in our canons sanction for his proceedings, his undutiful expressions towards one who is his sovereign by divine right, and who can do no wrong? And above all, where does he find authority for inflaming the passions of a vile mob against a nation intended by nature and ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... matter.[113] Yet, that the reader may have a short view hereof, and not be left wholly unsatisfied, these two things shall briefly be opened and insisted upon, viz: 1. Certain considerations shall be propounded, tending to clear the state of the question about the divine right of synods, and their power. 2. The proposition itself, with some few arguments adduced, for the ...
— The Divine Right of Church Government • Sundry Ministers Of Christ Within The City Of London
... Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical times the Umbrians regularly submitted ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... that the throne belongs to David and his descendants by real 'divine right,' and that God's choice is Solomon, who is to inherit both the promises and obligations of the office, and, among the latter, that of building the Temple. The unspoken inference is that loyalty to Solomon would be obedience to Jehovah. The connection between the true ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... contrary, possess a sovereignty with an amount of power precisely equal to that which has been granted to them by the parties to the national compact, and nothing beyond. We admit of no government by divine right, believing that so far as power is concerned the Beneficent Creator has made no distinction amongst men; that all are upon an equality, and that the only legitimate right to govern is an express grant of power from the governed. The Constitution of the United States is the instrument containing ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... divide the scientific world; so that believers in "the divine right of majorities" need not hesitate which side to take, at least for the present. Up to a time quite within the memory of a generation still on the stage, two hypotheses about the nature of light very unequally divided the scientific world. But the small minority has already ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... follow him there, said Stephen. All correct there. Everything accordant there. (He did not go so far as to say, for her pleasure, that there was a sort of Divine Right there; but, I have heard claims almost as magnificent ...
— Hard Times • Charles Dickens*
... was also said by enviers that if he would begin to erect a window to every small competitor his Trust had squeezed to death there would be an unprecedented flurry in stained glass. But Browett knew, as an evolutionist, that the eagle has a divine right to the lamb if it can come safely off with it; as a Christian, that one carries out the will of God as indubitably in preserving the established order of prince and subject, of noble and plebeian, as in giving of his abundance to relieve the necessitous—or in endowing universities which should ...
— The Seeker • Harry Leon Wilson
... miss the point! There's a great difference between claiming one's own and struggling to get possession of something that is lawfully another's. If I were in Miss Pelham's place, and were sure the one I loved belonged to me by divine right, I'd have her—I'd have her in spite of the devil and all his works. But the thing would be to be sure. And one couldn't be sure so long as another claimant hadn't had his chance to be thrown down. When he'd had his chance, and the ...
— Martha By-the-Day • Julie M. Lippmann
... Lepidi, the Master of the Sacred Palace, in which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws, originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4] ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard
... office that old Charley Hedrick was merely exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the King Cole about Hedrick—in that he was a merry old soul—he was always king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not ashamed ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White
... outskirts of the city, and demands of us our money or our life, may we not justly slay Alexander Nicolaiovitch, who comes to our homes in the person of his tax-gatherers to take the bread out of our children's mouths and to help himself to whatever he chooses by the divine right of his Romanoff heirship? I tell you, Herr Max, we may blamelessly lie in wait for him wherever we find him, and whoso says us nay is siding with the wolf against the lambs, with the robber and the slayer against the honest representative of right ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... accused "as addicted to the hierarchy of the Church of England," "guilty of offence against the Commonwealth by baptizing children on the Lord's Day," and "the more heinous sin of provoking the people to revolt by questioning the divine right of the New England theocracy." An new life dawned on the Church in America when, in 1701, there was organized in England "The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts." It awakened a new missionary spirit. Princess ...
— Five Sermons • H.B. Whipple
... perceptions of the whites (whom for the most part he despised); though he preferred to be otherwise, for he was a fine figure—not a plaster saint by any means, but a hero in his way and well set up, and an artist by Divine Right. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield
... the lawfulness of acknowledging the queen's supremacy: on the other hand, the attempts of sir Francis Knowles to inspire her majesty with jealousy of the designs of the archbishop, by whom some advances were made towards claiming for the episcopal order an authority by divine right, independently of the appointment of the head of the church, failed entirely of success. No ecclesiastic had ever been able to acquire so great an ascendency over the mind of Elizabeth as Whitgift; there was a conformity in ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin
... any such contradiction I reassert the statement. The shot-gun was not resorted to. Masked men did not ride over the country at night intimidating voters; but there was a firm feeling that a class existed in every State with a sort of divine right to control public affairs. If they could not get this control by one means they must by another. The end justified the means. The coercion, ...
— Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant, Complete • Ulysses S. Grant
... one of my journeys through Europe. I do not know how the police who guarded his carriage did not drive me away, fearing a possible attempt, but what I felt was compassion for the kings who have come so late into a world that no longer believes in the divine right; and these last twigs, sprouting from the worm-eaten and rotten trunk of a dynasty, carry in their poor sap the decay of the rotten branches. It was a youth, as sick as I am, not by the chances of life, but weakly from his cradle, condemned before his birth to suffer ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... demand that government shall require the consent of all the governed, and not only of a majority. It is undeniable that the rule of a majority may be almost as hostile to freedom as the rule of a minority: the divine right of majorities is a dogma as little possessed of absolute truth as any other. A strong democratic State may easily be led into oppression of its best citizens, namely, those those independence of mind would make them a force for progress. Experience of ...
— Proposed Roads To Freedom • Bertrand Russell
... longer treat any church or denomination as an end in itself. All alike exist for the great end of the Kingdom of God and are to be judged by their efficiency in promoting that end among men. So no system of church order can be regarded as of divine right in itself but only so far as it becomes a channel of the Spirit of God and mediates His gifts to men. All the churches as we know them to-day have grown up in controversy and represent a long process of development and adaptation. If we are ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... little regard he had, at least how little regard the mistress of his councils had, for the honour of his advisers. The pair might have used Falkland to lure by the pledge of his high character the leaders of the Parliament into the acceptance of a treaty? which the King, with his notions of divine right, and the Queen with her passionate love of absolute power, would, there can be little doubt, have violated as soon as the army of the Parliament had been disbanded, and the power of the sword had returned into the King's ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... which case the ultimate test of democracy is conceded—or those who think themselves wisest and best: which latter is what in the mouths of such advocates it usually does mean. Thus those to whom the Divine Right of the conceited makes no appeal are forced back on the Jeffersonian formula. Let it be noted that that formula does not mean that the people are always right or that a people cannot collectively do deliberate injustice or commit sins—indeed, inferentially it implies that possibility—but ...
— A History of the United States • Cecil Chesterton
... individual self-respect which animated his Puritan forefathers. One question, and only one question, he frequently tells us, is of real importance. All the rest is mere verbiage. The single dogma worth attacking or defending is the divine right of kings. Are men, in the old phrase, born saddled and bridled, and other men ready booted and spurred, or are they not? That is the single shibboleth which distinguishes true men from false. Others, he says, bowed their heads to the image of the beast. 'I spit upon it, ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... Parliament. A Conservative in Parliament is, of course, obliged to promote a great many things which he does not really approve. Mr. Gresham quite understood that. You can't have tests and qualifications, rotten boroughs and the divine right of kings, back again. But as the glorious institutions of the country are made to perish, one after the other, it is better that they should receive the coup de grace tenderly from loving hands than be roughly ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... all others have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters; they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, and they had but scant opportunity to give their children the schooling in which they ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt
... King of America," has been related of James Oliver. He was a commanding figure, with the face and front of a man in whom there was no parley. He was a good man to agree with. In any emergency, even up to his eightieth year, he would have at once taken charge of affairs by divine right. His voice was the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard
... attained a moral and intellectual culture which enabled him even to idealize so beautiful and perfect a creature. She was not a saint in the mystical or imaginative sense of the word, but, as a queen reigning by the divine right of her surpassing loveliness and grace in even Hillaton's exclusive society, she was practically as far removed from him as if she were an ideal saint existing only ...
— A Knight Of The Nineteenth Century • E. P. Roe
... No-breakfast Plan means the highest possible health, the greatest possible relief from the slavery of toil. On no other plan are there such promises of relief and prevention of all your sex ailings. On this plan only can you become man's equal in the hours of leisure that are his by a feeling of divine right; you also should consider the possibilities of a day of eight or ten hours as needing the reduction all the more ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... proper direction; but such accidents are a sort of prodigies, and, like other prodigies, it is an alarming omen, and of dire portent to the times. For if virtue cannot keep to her allegiance those men, who in their hearts confess her divine right, and know the value of her laws, on whose fidelity and obedience can she depend? May such geniuses never descend to flatter vice, encourage folly, or propagate irreligion; but exert all their powers in the service of virtue, and celebrate the noble choice ...
— Dialogues of the Dead • Lord Lyttelton
... he had discovered in Moliere a convenient mouthpiece for his dislikes. The selfish king was no lover of the nobility, and was short-sighted enough not to perceive that the author's attacks on the nobles paved the way for doubts on the divine right of kings themselves. Hence he protected Moliere, and entrusted to him the care of writing plays for his entertainments; the public did not, however, see The Bores until the 4th of November of the same year; and then it met with ...
— The Bores • Moliere
... cried Turnbull, scornfully, "is a submissive and loyal and obedient gentleman. He likes the people who wear crowns, whether of diamonds or of stars. He believes in the divine right of kings, and it is appropriate enough that he should have the king for his second. But it is not appropriate to me that I should have God for my second. God is not good enough. I dislike and I deny the divine right of kings. But I dislike more and I deny more the divine ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... and he becomes arbitrary and inconsiderate of those who have exalted him. Serves the foolish ones right, I suppose is the proper verdict. But one is not indignant at the worship of their emperor by the Japanese: he is a real ruler, has power, and stands firmly upon divine right. The Japanese are yet children politically; but the English should be out ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... Blazer, Garnet, and others—who, either from false training, bad example, or warped spirits, had come to the condition of believing that the world was made for their special behoof; that they possessed that "divine right" to rule which is sometimes claimed by kings, and that whoever chanced to differ from them was guilty of arrogance, and required to be put down! These men were not only bad, like most of the others, but revengeful and resolute. They submitted, in the meantime, to the "might" of Paul Burns, ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... the clergy more useful servants than the soldiers and the police. In the New World, when royalty, in the act of abdication, had passed the scepter behind its back to capitalism, the ecclesiastical bodies had transferred their allegiance to the money power, and as formerly they had preached the divine right of kings to rule their fellow-men, now preached the divine right of ruling and using others which inhered in the possession of accumulated or inherited wealth, and the duty of the people to submit ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... heliolatry organized principally for political ends by the Incas of Peru, stands alone in the religions of the red race. Those shrewd legislators at an early date officially announced that Inti, the sun, their own elder brother, was ruler of the cohorts of heaven by like divine right that they were of the four corners of the earth. This scheme ignominiously failed, as every attempt to fetter the liberty of conscience must and should. The later Incas finally indulged publicly in ...
— The Myths of the New World - A Treatise on the Symbolism and Mythology of the Red Race of America • Daniel G. Brinton
... insisted upon travelling with his temporary favourite when the lives and livelihoods of the best blood of Britain were being staked for his throne whilst he amused himself, I suppose we should wear white favours, and believe in the divine right of Kings. It must be impossible for her to forget that the Prince, whom death has proved to be worthy of the praise most people now accord him, was far from popular in his lifetime, and the pet gibe and sport of Punch. I suppose when she is dead or ...
— Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books • Horatia K. F. Eden
... kindly at her. "I'll take you. We'll get out of this for good and all. I'll bust a bank or forge a cheque. You've got the divine right to go, old dear!" ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... this fabled island she had been too much under the influence of the glamour with which her dreams had invested Cyprus during the years of her betrothal for any serious study of conditions, or questions of right and wrong. She had been taught that kings rule by Divine Right, and no question of succession troubled her confidence of the people's choice of Janus as their sovereign. For her there were no disputes to consider, for the troubled state of Cyprus, but too well known in the Council Chambers of the Republic, had never been revealed to her. Janus ...
— The Royal Pawn of Venice - A Romance of Cyprus • Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull
... this is true of our English girls, still more would it be true of the American girl, who has a unique position and influence of her own, and is dowered with that peculiar capacity and graciousness which seem to belong by divine right to ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of democracy. A. The dynastic feudal state (Ancien Regime). 1. Description of the Ancien Regime. 2. Proponents of the Ancien Regime. Dynasties (divine right monarchs). Feudal landlords. Higher clergy and state churches. The army command (younger sons of the nobility). The schools (education for privileged classes only). B. The revolutionary elements. 1. The ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... and gentlemen, we are not here today to conclude that God set the white man over the black. We are to conclude simply that He set him apart from the black man. The divine right of slavery was an impiety, and, worst of all, an absurdity. The South made that mistake, and bitter has been the price of her folly. Yet the South, having sinned, paid the price of her sinning in all ways exacted of her. She accepted the ruling of the North, and, as a distinguished ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough
... been done. He, himself, flung broadcast the fires of burning incitation without heeding or caring whither the flames might reach. Riots had been successful before this: why not now? He was young enough and innocent enough to believe in the divine right of a just cause. If that were denied, ...
— The Waters of Edera • Louise de la Rame, a.k.a. Ouida
... Concepcion, [1] who wrote in the eighteenth century, bases the Spaniards' right to conquest solely on the religious theory. He affirms that the Spanish kings inherited a divine right to these Islands, their dominion being directly prophesied in Isaiah xviii. He assures us that this title from Heaven was confirmed by apostolic authority, [2] and by "the many manifest miracles with which ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... its divine right from its conformity with these ideas, all its human sanction from ...
— The Trial of Theodore Parker • Theodore Parker
... his great puffed sleeves and gold chains and full-skirted over-dress he seems to tell of a tread that might sometimes have been inconveniently resonant. But the purpose to have his way and work his will is there—the great stomach for divine right, the old monarchical temperament. The great Titian, in portraiture, however, remains that formidable young man in black, with the small compact head, the delicate nose and the irascible blue eye. Who was he? What was he? "Ritratto virile" is all the catalogue is able to call ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... that most of the Scottish songs which refer to our history, are essentially aristocratic, and favourable to the divine right of kings. The Covenanters—our true freemen—disdained the use of the poet's pen. They uttered none of their aspirations for freedom in song, and thus the Royalists had the whole field of song-writing to themselves. Such was the state of matters until Burns rose from amidst ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volume III - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... her Protestant sisters, that art of striking the senses and filling the imagination in which the Catholic Church so eminently excels. But, on the other hand, she continued to be, for more than a hundred and fifty years, the servile handmaid of monarchy, the steady enemy of public liberty. The divine right of kings, and the duty of passively obeying all their commands, were her favourite tenets. She held those tenets firmly through times of oppression, persecution, and licentiousness; while law was trampled down; while judgment was ...
— Critical and Historical Essays Volume 1 • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... way into my mind. Shortly before, there had been a revolution in France; the Bourbons had been dismissed: and I believed that it was unchristian for nations to cast off their governors, and, much more, sovereigns who had the divine right of inheritance. Again, the great Reform agitation was going on around me as I wrote. The Whigs had come into power; Lord Grey had told the Bishops to set their house in order, and some of the prelates had been insulted and ...
— Apologia pro Vita Sua • John Henry Newman
... premises with much dignity, deferred to on all sides by the other members. His kingship is rarely disputed, having been achieved by the sort of conquest most familiar in the pelican club; and his divine right is as much respected as ...
— The Strand Magazine, Volume V, Issue 27, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... taken it for granted that I had some sort of divine right. When I look into it I see that's silly. We're living in America, not in Spain of the seventeenth century. I've no right except what the ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... successors to James II. We may freely allow that in these cases, and in many similar ones, there existed on ethical grounds a right, or more strictly a communal duty, to rebel. Few would now proclaim with Filmer the divine right of any government to exact obedience quite irrespective of the wishes or the interests of its subjects. Still fewer would agree with Hobbes that an original contract precludes for ever all opposition to sovereign ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... man who has 'thoughts too deep for tears' agreeing to wear a 'bag-wig' ... the case of poor Wordsworth's going to court, you know.—Mr. Haydon being infinitely serious all the time, and yet holding the doctrine of the divine right of princes in ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... chosen governesses. One of these, young as she was, was a really remarkable woman, for whom English history had hatched itself into something like a philosophy. Her philosophy had two bases, one being the postulate of the divine right of kings, the other being her interpretation of the victory of the Normans over the Anglo-Saxons. Charles I she presented to our imaginations as a martyr; and, what was still more important, she seriously taught us that the population ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... Stuart. Hugh MacKay was the younger son of an ancient Highland house of large possessions and much influence in the distant North of Scotland; his people were suspicious of the Stuarts because the kings of that ill-fated line were intoxicated with the idea of divine right, and were ever clutching at absolute power; nor had the MacKays any overwhelming and reverential love for bishops, because they considered them to be the instruments of royal tyranny and the oppressors ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... through its own iniquity ceases to exist, we must, to establish a new government on a true and just basis, go back to the origin of Civil Authority. No one argues now for the Divine Right of Kings, but in studying the old controversy we get light on the subject of government that is of all time. To the conception that kings held their power immediately from God, "Suarez boldly opposed the thesis of the initial sovereignty of the people; ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... thrones by reason of their descent from the chiefs of the plundering tribes which invaded Europe during the Dark Ages. By this time, the kings had forgotten that they owed their power to the swords of their fighting men, and there had grown up a doctrine called "The Divine Right of Kings." In other words, the kings claimed that God in his wisdom had seen fit to make them rulers over these lands, and that they were responsible to God alone. In this way they tried to make it appear that ...
— The World War and What was Behind It - The Story of the Map of Europe • Louis P. Benezet
... covet, and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark tangle. The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It is conscious Darwinism—the survival of the fittest, materially, which he is applying to the world—Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will. And the non-Germanic world—the Latin world, for it is a Latin world in varying degrees of saturation outside of Germany—rejects ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... were by that name signed for his disciples first in Antioch. Remember, further, since that name was first given the influence of the symbol, both in extreme unction and in consecration of priests and kings to their "divine right;" and thing, if you can reach with any grasp of thought, what the influence on the earth has been, of those twisted branches whose leaves give gray bloom to the hillsides under every breeze that blows from the midland sea. But, above and beyond all, think how strange it is ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... and indulgence. I am not only this day the advocate of my client, but I am lending my humble efforts to defend, perhaps I ought to say, assert, the divine right and sacredness of the social compact of marriage, the palladium of every married man's family, happiness and comfort. I will remind you, gentlemen of the jury, that this is the first action of the kind that has been tried on these ...
— A Voyage Round the World, Vol. I (of ?) • James Holman
... While the economical Elizabeth spared not her treasures to support the Flemings against Spain, and Henry IV. against the League, James abandoned his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchild, to the fury of their enemies. While he exhausted his learning to establish the divine right of kings, he allowed his own dignity to sink into the dust; while he exerted his rhetoric to prove the absolute authority of kings, he reminded the people of theirs; and by a useless profusion, sacrificed the chief of his sovereign rights— that of dispensing with ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... OF THE, the doctrine that in and under the dominion of pure reason the will is free, and not free otherwise; that in this element the Will "reigns unquestioned and by Divine right"; only in minds in which volition is treated as a synonym of Desire does this doctrine admit ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... forget: (But want of Memory commends their Wit.) Where 'twas enacted Treason, not to own Hers and her Sanedrins right to place the Crown. But her weak Heads oth' Church, mistaken fools, Wanted the Light of their sublimer Schools: For Divine Right could no such Forces bring. } But Wisdom now expands her wider Wing, } And Streams are ever deeper than the Spring. } Besides, they've sense of Honour; and who knows How far the Gratitude of Priest-craft goes? And what if now like old Elisha fed, ...
— Anti-Achitophel (1682) - Three Verse Replies to Absalom and Achitophel by John Dryden • Elkanah Settle et al.
... Stuarts. How came the house of Hanover upon the throne? You see, sir, that if you zealous loyalists could shift off James, we, with less belief in the divine right of kings, ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce
... a dingy law office in Virginia, out of a cobbler's shop in Wales, out of a village doctor's office in France and from a farm on the island of Sicily came the four men who, in the grand old palace at Versailles, will soon put the quietus on the divine right of kings. ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... away into disappointment and lethargy when the German princes forgot their pledges of internal reform. The policy of the German and Austrian rulers was dominated by the reactionary Austrian Prime Minister, Prince Metternich, a consistent champion of aristocratic ideas and of the "divine right of Kings." The "Revolution of July," 1830, however, which overthrew the Bourbon dynasty in France, had its counterpart in popular movements that forced the granting of constitutions or other liberal concessions in several German states; and, though ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... good old days of France the fair, when no one dared question the divine right of the sovereign, or the purity of the church,—when the rights of the feudal seigneurs were unchallenged, and they could head or hang, mutilate or quarter their vassals at their pleasure,—when freedom was a word as unmeaning ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray
... distinct clogs to civilization, their existence remains pathetically legitimate. Nuisances, they are still nuisances with a hereditary hold on history. Their chief modern claim for continuance is the fact that they were once authorized by that very "divine right" which is now the scorn and jest of philosophy, and that the communities which they still infest are yet unprepared for the shock of their extirpation. It is clear that they will one day be sloughed off like a mass of dead animal tissue, ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... like mind; the old Monarchical idea of reasons of State still inspired the Revolutionary Tribunal. Eight centuries of absolute power had moulded the magisterial conscience, and it was by the principles of Divine Right that the Court even now tried and sentenced ...
— The Gods are Athirst • Anatole France
... power was enveloped and strangled by the undergrowth of a bastard feudalism, by the territorial power of aristocracies which, under cover of administrative titles, converted whole provinces into family estates and claimed over their tenants the divine right of unlimited and irresponsible sovereignty. To investigate all the reasons for the political backwardness of these eastern peoples would carry us far afield. But one reason lies on the surface. Outside the free towns they had ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... king was surrounded by his generals and officers; all eyes were fixed upon him; he had silenced every objection. There was amongst them but one opinion and one will, the will and opinion of the king, whom all felt to be their master, not only by divine right, but by his mighty intellect and great soul. Frederick stood amongst them, his countenance beaming with inspiration, his eagle eye sparkling and glowing with the fire of thought, and a smile was on his lips which won all hearts. Behind ...
— Frederick the Great and His Court • L. Muhlbach
... certain exaggerated proposition. Instead of brotherly confession one to another, or the pastoral sympathy of a fatherly elder, the religious mind of the day was instructed in an awful mysterious sacrament of confession, which gave to some human being a divine right to unlock the most secret chambers of the soul, to scrutinize and direct its most veiled and intimate thoughts, and, standing in God's stead, to direct the current of its most sensitive and most ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various
... deal. Primrose, I think, lops off a bit of self-conceit and belief in the divine right of kings, at every interview. And he is ...
— A Little Girl in Old Philadelphia • Amanda Minnie Douglas
... he casts over the sky!' said the King, a young man, whose divine right was never questioned by his female subjects. 'What a commotion in the waters, and what a wind he snorts forth! It certainly must be the largest fish that exists. I remember my father telling me that a monstrous fish once got entangled among our rocks, and ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... rolling coal. His spur clinks on the hearth. Overhead, the rain hammers and chinks. She is so pure and whole. Only because he has her soul will she resign herself to him, for where the soul has gone, the body must be given as a sign. He takes her by the divine right of the only lover. He has sworn to fight her lord, and wed her after. Should he be overborne, she will die adoring him, forlorn, ...
— Sword Blades and Poppy Seed • Amy Lowell
... point of view but that to which their forbears, Jesuit-trained, and of limited outlook, had educated them. They were quite impervious to new ideas, very tenacious of old ones, and fully convinced of their own divine right. The Habsburg line of policy towards Bohemia was laid down by Ferdinand II—or shall I say for that monarch?—at the Te Deum sung in St. Stephen's Cathedral, at Vienna, to celebrate the victory of Rome over Bohemia's religious ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... legislation (see Referendum), nominations; primaries; elections; taxes (see Taxation). Discharge, reason of, must be stated by employer. Discrimination, unlawful under early common law; modern view of; by the "trusts"; the Elkins law against; in ordinary trade; against localities by trusts. Divine right, asserted by King James. Divorce, chapter concerning, chapter XVII; jurisdiction over first in church; reform movement discussed (see Marriage and Divorce); equal rights of husband and wife; causes for to both sexes alike; statistics discussed; in most cases given to the wife; whether ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... tradition at the strongest link; and Copernicus erected an invincible power that set for ever the mark of progress upon the time that was to come. There is the same unbound originality and disregard for inherited sanctions in the rare philosophers as in the discovery of Divine Right, and the intruding Imperialism of Rome. The like effects are visible everywhere, and one generation beheld them all. It was an awakening of new life; the world revolved in a different orbit, determined by influences unknown before. ...
— A Lecture on the Study of History • Lord Acton
... the land of what is venerable in antiquity, than of beauty, by divine right young eternally in spite of age. This is due partly to her history and art and literature, partly to the temper of the races who have made her what she is, and partly to her natural advantages. Her oldest architectural remains, the temples of Paestum and Girgenti, ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Second Series • John Addington Symonds
... having received an appointment from Adolph, the Bishop of Merseburg (who had posted the inhibition on the Leipzig churches against the Disputation,[8] to write against the Reformer. Alveld's work, justifying the divine right of the Apostolic Chair, to all learned men, appeared early in May,[9] in the Latin language, in a first edition full of errors, followed quickly by a second edition.[10] Alveld attempted to cut Luther to pieces with "seven swords," ...
— Works of Martin Luther - With Introductions and Notes (Volume I) • Martin Luther
... to Starkey Manor-House—some of his Lancashire neighbours having lent their good offices to reconcile him to the powers that were. He was as firm a Roman Catholic as ever, and as staunch an advocate for the Stuarts and the divine right of kings; but his religion almost amounted to asceticism, and the conduct of those with whom he had been brought in such close contact at St. Germains would little bear the inspection of a stern moralist. So he gave his allegiance where he could not give his esteem, and ...
— Curious, if True - Strange Tales • Elizabeth Gaskell
... law. Yes, divine right! I have learned," she continued, turning to the President, "that a bare handful of men own or control all the public utilities of this great country. It doesn't seem possible! But," abruptly, "you believe ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... modern world had come to put so much faith, is only another delusion of a mechanical age. The burden of history is for him always the need of the Able Man. "I say, Find me the true Koenning, King, Able Man, and he has a divine right over me." Carlyle thus throws down the gauntlet at once to the scientific and to the democratic movements of his time. His pronounced antagonism to the modern spirit in these two most important manifestations must be kept steadily in mind in our ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle
... who were worshipped in the cities over which they held sway. They thus claimed to be of divine descent, not by adoption, but by actual birth. The divinity that was in them was inherited; it was not merely communicated by a later and artificial process. The "divine right," by grace of which they ruled, was ...
— Babylonians and Assyrians, Life and Customs • Rev. A. H. Sayce
... bequeathed an interminable quarrel to his followers. The principle of election, thus introduced, raised the first three caliphs, Abu-Bekr, Omar, Othman, to the cathedra at Medina; but a strong minority held that the "divine right" rested with Ali, the "Lion of God," first convert to Islam, husband of the prophet's daughter Fatima, and father of Mahomet's only male descendants. When Ali in turn became the fourth caliph, he was the mark for jealousy, intrigue, and at length assassination; his sons, the grandsons ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... like; whether whale liver and bacon could be told from natural liver and bacon, and whether whale steak would probably taste like catfish or mebbe more like mud turtle. Sandy Sawtelle, who always knows everything by divine right, like you might say, he says in superior tones that it won't taste like either one but has a flavour all its own, which even he can't describe, though it will be something like the meat of the wild sea cow, which roams the ocean in vast herds off ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... to crumble and collapse. Before the armistice was signed on Nov. 11, 1918, Mr. Wilson had overthrown the doctrine of Divine right in Europe. The Hapsburgs ran away. The Kaiser was compelled to abdicate and take refuge in exile, justifying his flight by the explanation that Wilson would not make peace with Germany while a Hohenzollern was on the throne. This was the climax of Mr. Wilson's power and influence and, ...
— Woodrow Wilson's Administration and Achievements • Frank B. Lord and James William Bryan
... without any head, and both at once turned their eyes on Pitt. One party saw in him the only man who could rescue the King; the other saw in him the only man who could purify the Parliament. He was supported on one side by Archbishop Markham, the preacher of divine right, and by Jenkinson, the captain of the Praetorian band of the King's friends; on the other side by Jebb and Priestley, Sawbridge and Cartwright, Jack Wilkes and Horne Tooke. On the benches of the House of Commons, however, the ranks of the ministerial majority ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... at best is shadowy, indefinite, depending mostly upon traditional custom and audacious assumption backed by armed force. If it fall back upon a certain alleged divine right it cannot produce documents to prove its authority. The industrial monarchs of the United States are fortified with both power and proofs of possession. Those bonds and stocks are the tangible titles to tangible property; whoso ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers
... deciding the life or death of hundreds and thousands? Who can say? At all events the powerful features of the king's face betrayed no such uneasy doubt—only a deep earnestness and an immovable steadiness of expression. Belief in the divine right of his kingship gave him power over the minds of men, and he took his duties on him in this hour without weakness or failing, grasping with his human hand the obscure spiritual web of man's destiny, and with his limited intelligence ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... general body of Christ was conditioned solely on the new birth, or salvation. Since the individual church was the local embodiment of the general church, none but the saved could properly become members thereof, and all who were truly saved (in the same locality) belonged to it by divine right. At this point, however, the human element in the constitution of the local church became manifest. We have pointed out the divine element in the true church—the element that particularly distinguished it as ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith
... sanctification, and adoption. They were also opposed to the working of the Act which, in 1712, restored lay patronage. If the Assembly enforced the law of the land in this matter (and it did), the Assembly sinned against the divine right of congregations to elect their own preachers. Men of this way of thinking were led by the Rev. Mr Ebenezer Erskine, a poet who, in 1714, addressed an Ode to George I. He ...
— A Short History of Scotland • Andrew Lang
... all historical precedent, in behalf of the slaves of modern industry rather than in behalf of the fortunate few who give up so grudgingly the practical powers they have usurped. There were those, indeed, who fought passionately for the divine right of kings, those who died to maintain the right of a white man to hold Negroes as slaves; there are those today who with a truly religious fervor uphold the right of the capitalistic class to manage the industries of the country at their own sweet will, ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... in the government of states. Never was Rome farther away from the realisation of its ancient dream of universal dominion. And when the French Revolution burst forth, it may well have been imagined that the proclamation of the rights of man would kill that papacy to which the exercise of divine right over the nations had been committed. And so how great at first was the anxiety, the anger, the desperate resistance with which the Vatican opposed the idea of freedom, the new credo of liberated reason, of humanity regaining ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... earth; I am Caesar, a Christian Caesar, ruling in love, to whom all Christians owe allegiance; I hold in my hands the curses of hell, and the benedictions of heaven; I absolve all subjects from allegiance to kings; I give and take away, by divine right, all thrones and principalities of Christendom—beware how you desecrate the patrimony given me by your invisible king, yea, bow down your necks to me, and pray that the anger of God may be averted." And the superstitious conquerors wept, and bowed their faces ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... carved into the form of a man—a man who usually represented the ruler or chief of the people, and who, as he was the source of all power and wisdom, was supposed by the ignorant masses to be an incarnation of the sun. Thus arose the spiritual power of monarchs, or the "divine right of kings." ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble
... their worshippers and subjects. In this way the old savage notion of inspiration or possession gradually develops into the doctrine of the divinity of kings, which after a long period of florescence dwindles away into the modest theory that kings reign by divine right, a theory familiar to our ancestors not long ago, and perhaps not wholly obsolete among us even now. However, inspired men need not always blossom out into divine kings; they may, and often do, remain in the chrysalis ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer
... no man was born—to use the language of Mr. Jefferson—booted and spurred to ride over the rest of mankind; that men were created equal—meaning the men of the political community; that there was no divine right to rule; that no man inherited the right to govern; that there were no classes by which power and place descended to families, but that all stations were equally within the grasp of each member of the body-politic. These were the great principles they announced; these were the purposes for which ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... antecedent of new and more lasting combinations. One thing is certain, that there is not a single code now in existence which is not false; that the graduation of the vices and virtues is wrong, and that in the future it will be altered. We must not hand ourselves over to a despotism with no Divine right, even if there be a risk of anarchy. In the determination of our own action, and in our criticism of other people, we must use the whole of ourselves and not mere fragments. If we do this we need not fear. We may suppose we are in danger because ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford
... it for their king; they set up a rotten plank, or a stone, for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more, by force, for a sample; return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opportunity; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of inhumanity and lust, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants: and this ...
— Gulliver's Travels - into several remote nations of the world • Jonathan Swift
... hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon acquire the ...
— The Professor at the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.)
... courts of kings and princes, and there boldly denounced vice and misrule. It was not difficult for a Chinese scholar and teacher to find access to the highest of the land. The Chinese believed in the divine right of learning, just as they believed in the divine right of kings. Mang employed every weapon of persuasion in trying to combat heresy and oppression; alternately ridiculing and reproving: now appealing in a burst of moral enthusiasm, and now denouncing in terms of cutting sarcasm the abuses which ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... national pride, which rallied the whole people round Elizabeth as the Armada threatened England or Drake threatened Spain, shielded indeed Elizabeth from much of the natural results of this drift of opinion. But with her death the new sentiment started suddenly to the front. The divine right of kings, the divine right of bishops, found themselves face to face with a passion for religious and political liberty which had gained vigour from the dungeon of the Catholic priest as from that of the ...
— History of the English People - Volume 4 (of 8) • John Richard Green
... hope for some amendment. But look at the actual state of things. The religious world is but a portion of the whole—a world within a world. Preachers of peace—men who arrogate to themselves the divine right of inculcating truth, and who, if any, should be free from the corruption that taints the social atmosphere,—such men come before mankind already sick with warfare, widening the breaches, subdividing our ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various
... objectionably burly and red in the face; they wore an offensive number of buttons and straps upon their uniforms. As Mr. Mafferton said, they utterly misconceived their position in life, attempting to Kaiser the travelling public by Divine right instead of recognising themselves as humble servants, buttoned only to be made more agreeable to ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... springing from prevailing interests in the respective localities, and institutions molded principles, until in turn principles should become strong enough to reform institutions. In short, slavery was one of the many "relics of barbarism"—like the divine right of kings, religious persecution, torture of the accused, imprisonment and enslavement for debt, witch-burning, and kindred "institutions"—which were transmitted to that generation from former ages as so many burdens ...
— Abraham Lincoln: A History V1 • John G. Nicolay and John Hay
... it, and were without the necessary apostolic commission. They insisted on their form of sacraments as essential to salvation; they {122} drew up their infallible creeds; they set up Church officials who were to rule over other men's faith, and they assumed a certain divine right to compel the consciences of their members. Most of the Reformers have even sanctioned the use of bonds and prisons to secure uniformity of faith! The primitive apostles claimed no such right and made use of ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... pinches," retorted Graves. "You mean I've consistently neglected to vote for you. Somehow I never could swallow your assumption of divine right to hold office ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther
... anticipate the Revolution to which he, more than any man, had contributed. Walpole, with stronger personal reasons than Voltaire for disliking a catastrophe, was as furious as Burke when the volcano burst forth. He was a republican so far as he disbelieved in the divine right of kings, and hated enthusiasm and loyalty generally. He wished the form to survive and the spirit to disappear. Things were rotten, and he wished them to stay rotten. The ideal to which he is constantly ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... of Mexico, he looked around for a man who would serve him as a tool to hold the country. Such a man he found in Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian, the brother of the emperor of Austria, a dreamer rather than a man of action, and a fervent believer in the "divine right of kings." This was the kind of man that the French usurper was in want of, and he offered him the position of emperor of Mexico. Maximilian was taken by surprise. The proposition was a startling one. But in the end ambition ...
— Historical Tales - The Romance of Reality - Volume III • Charles Morris
... unanswered, and so the appointment was confirmed, and Milton, no new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. In March, 1651, his first Defence of the English People was in print. In this great pamphlet Milton asserts, as against the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the undisputed sovereignty of the people; and he maintains the proposition that, as well by the law of God, as by the law of nations, and the law of England, a king of England may be brought to trial and death, the people being discharged from all obligations of loyalty when a lawful ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... restricted constitutional form; she has all the venerable, splendid accessories—and I hope "Albert the Good" may have founded a long race of good kings; but it would not do for us;—a race cradled in revolution, and nurtured on irreverence and unbelief, as regards the divine right of kings and the law of primogeniture. To us it seems, though a primitive, an unnatural institution. We find no analogies for it, even in the wildest venture of the New World. It is true the buffalo herd has its kingly commander, who goes plunging along ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... know, that the best part of a Christian's duty in this world of much evil, is to thole and suffer with resignation, as lang as it is possible for human nature to do. I do not counsel passive obedience: that is a doctrine that the Church of Scotland can never abide; but the divine right of resistance, which, in the days of her trouble, she so bravely asserted against popish and prelatic usurpations, was never resorted to till the attempt was made to remove the ark of the tabernacle from her. I therefore counsel you, my young friends, not to lend your ears to those that trumpet forth ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt
... King Street was a favorite place of meeting for the Club which recognized Simms as king by divine right. From these pleasant gatherings grew the thought of giving to Charleston a medium through which the productions of her thought might go out to the world. In April, 1857, appeared Russell's Magazine, bearing the names of Paul Hamilton Hayne and W.B. Carlisle as editors, though upon Hayne devolved ...
— Literary Hearthstones of Dixie • La Salle Corbell Pickett
... sons of a few families peculiarly fitted by nature to be governors of the State? Look at history, and wake up to common sense. Of the divine right of kings I shall not speak, for the adherents of the doctrine are in our day relegated to museums of antiquities. And have the members of aristocracies been carefully bred with a view to their intellectual and moral superiority, ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... attended by ladies of her court. There is a refinement and an elegance about the empress, a grace and sweet dignity, that is fascinating. This is royalty, —stately and cold perhaps: even the mouth may be a little cruel, I begin to perceive, as I think of her; but she wears the purple by divine right. I have not seen on any walls any figure walking out of history so captivating as this lady, who would seem to have been worthy of apotheosis in a Christian edifice. Can there be any doubt that this lovely woman was orthodox? She, also, has a story, which you doubtless have ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... not as some had supposed on compact, but as Paley afterwards affirmed, on the will of God. By the divine will, the supreme power is placed "originally and ultimately in the people; and they never did, in fact, freely, nor can they rightfully, make an absolute, unlimited renunciation of this divine right. It is ever in the nature of a thing given in trust; and on a condition the performance of which no mortal can dispense with, namely, that the person or persons, on whom the sovereignty is conferred by the people, shall incessantly consult their ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... better, but bad. The Commissary Department is good. There is no management whatever in the War Department. Against a good nation we should be helpless," and these animadversions are reiterated in subsequent entries. Interesting comments from the greatest of contemporary Republicans on the divine right of the Republican party to conduct all American wars and transact all other American business of importance. But doubtless the Colonel had forgotten all this in 1917, and many other good Americans had also forgotten ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... the result may look in the last analysis, it is clear that a faculty such as Stonor's for overrating the value of the individual in the scheme of things, does seem more effectually than any mere patent of nobility to confer upon a man the 'divine right' to dictate to his fellows and to look down upon them. The thing is founded on illusion, but it is founded as firm as many another figment that has governed men and seen the generations come to heel and go crouching ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... votes for women." She ridiculed the arguments of the anti-suffragists and said: "Until you grant the right of a vote to all persons, you haven't a democracy—you have an aristocracy and the worst of all—an aristocracy of sex. Soon the divine right of sex here will be as obsolete as the divine right of Kings in Europe." Answering the argument that if women have the ballot they ought also to have the musket, Dr. Shaw said in telling of the sufferings ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... continued the Judge, 'for I confess, at once, that I cannot demonstrate, either by logic or by mathematics, a modern quitclaim or warranty in holding slaves. In combating their illogical and unscriptural positions, I seem to them to be an advocate of the divine right of oppression,—which I am not. That it is best, however, and that it is right, for this relation to continue until God shall manifest some purpose to terminate it consistently with the good of all concerned, I am perfectly convinced and ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... infinite autocrat—a universe without republicanism, without democracy—a universe where all power comes from one and the same source, and where everyone using authority is accountable, not to the people, but to this supposed source of authority. Kings reign by divine right. Priests are ordained in a divinely appointed way—they do not get their office from man. Man is their servant, not ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll
... of morals have ideas changed so completely during the last eight years as in relation to "profits". Eighty years ago everyone believed in the divine right of property to do what it pleased its advantages, a doctrine more disastrous socially than the divine right of kings. There was no such sense of the immorality of "holding up" as pervades the public ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... Arbitrariness—the term seems the nearest we have to express the idea, but it is not quite happy, and the use of the more expressive German word "Willkuer" might be pardoned—is as great a danger in a democracy as in an autocracy, and it is less capable of remedy. The "divine right of the odd man" "to govern wrong" is too often assumed as an article of political faith. A new generation may think that to quote from an early Victorian writer is to appeal to the "dark ages"; but is there not a warning for all time in Hallam's words, "the absolute Government of the majority is ...
— Rebuilding Britain - A Survey Of Problems Of Reconstruction After The World War • Alfred Hopkinson
... religious orders were now united by the necessity of opposing a common front to the attacks of the Protestants, and they felt that the fate of the religion was intimately bound up with that of the dynasty. The principle of the Divine right of Kings was opposed to the doctrine of the right of the people to choose their monarch propounded by the Monarchomaques, and Roman Catholics were, by then, attached to the monarchy just as Calvinists ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... persons whose minds were entirely taken up at all times and on all occasions with such questions as the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Restoration of the Jews, or the progress of Unitarianism. I myself at one period took a pretty strong turn to inveighing against the doctrine of Divine Right, and am not yet cured of my prejudice on that subject. How many projectors have gone mad in good earnest from incessantly harping on one idea: the discovery of the philosopher's stone, the finding out the longitude, or paying ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt
... was not wisdom enough in him; so, clearly also, may Twenty-seven Million collective men!—But indeed one of the infalliblest fruits of Unwisdom in a Nation is that it cannot get the use of what Wisdom is actually in it: that it is not governed by the wisest it has, who alone have a divine right to govern in all Nations; but by the sham-wisest, or even by the openly not-so-wise if they are handiest otherwise! This is the infalliblest result of Unwisdom; and also the balefulest, immeasurablest,—not ...
— Past and Present - Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII. • Thomas Carlyle
... Stephen, who occupy that high place, merely inherited the seat from somebody who scrambled up there a few centuries ago. Somebody else probably got broken shoulders before your nimble progenitor took possession. Of course I am willing to admit that time does create in us the sense of a divine right in anything that we have owned for a number of years, as if our inheritance were the crown of some archaic king. I myself feel that strongly. If it came to the point, though I have said that I am too ...
— One Man in His Time • Ellen Glasgow
... and absurd as the doctrine of divine right most undoubtedly is, it is still more astonishing, that when so many human hereditary rights had centered in this king, his son and heir king Charles the first should be told by those infamous judges, who pronounced his unparalleled sentence, that he was an elective prince; elected by his ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... waged. Can there be such a thing as a religious war? There can be wars in the interest of different theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms uplifted on the battle-field ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various
... us and with whom we persist in waging a brutal war? Our race is by far the most destructive, the most hurtful, and the most formidable, of all the species of the planet. It has even invented for its own use the right of the strongest—a divine right which quiets its conscience in the face of the conquered and the oppressed; we have outlawed all that lives except ourselves. Revolting and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach of the law of justice! The bad faith and hypocrisy of it are renewed on a small scale by all ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... investing a sovereign with the outward and visible signs of his divine right to be blown skyhigh ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... and down thinking of these things, his mother's words flashed into his mind. "Be always loyal to God and the King above all things," she had impressed upon him. "The King is God's anointed one, and he rules by divine right." Dane had never doubted this, neither did he do so now. But he had since learned that love, too, is a divine thing, and cannot lightly be disobeyed. What is the King to me? he asked himself. A mere name. But Jean is a living reality. The King lives in luxury, ...
— The King's Arrow - A Tale of the United Empire Loyalists • H. A. Cody
... advantage—of getting into heaven by paying for masses. Its principal defect is that it keeps apart the rich and poor, creates and widens the breach between classes, causing those who have the money to consider that it is theirs by Divine right, and those who have it not to forget that the origin of wealth is thrift and patience and energy, and that the way to wealth is always open for all who dare to enter and to ...
— As We Are and As We May Be • Sir Walter Besant
... freeing the mind of man from ecclesiastical tyranny made eventually for political liberty, its whole tendency in England for the time being was in favour of absolute monarchy. Its first outcome here was to set up a secular monarchy, supreme in Church and State, founded on the theory of the divine right of kings, based on an aristocracy made loyal by ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... Convention was exactly that which had been previously fought between Buchanan and his antagonists. 'Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow, and Sir George Mackenzie, asserted,' says Malcolm Laing, 'the doctrine of divine right, or maintained, with more plausibility, that every illegal measure of James's government was vindicated by the declaration of the late Parliament, that he was an absolute monarch, entitled to unreserved obedience, AND ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... with his capital barred against him, it yet gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party that he was the only center of order and legitimate authority round which France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held the divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with declamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog of a Bearnois—much as our soi-disant Democrats have lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies of ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... woman rule a kingdom by divine right, and transfer the same to her husband?—Mary Tudor to Philip of Spain, is, of course, to be understood. Bullinger replied that it was a hazardous thing for the godly to resist the laws of a country. Philip the eunuch, though converted, did not drive Queen Candace out of Ethiopia. ...
— John Knox and the Reformation • Andrew Lang
... legitimacy. Countless thousands of human beings were slaughtered to satisfy the aversion of kings and nobles to the plan of one man who towered above them, and insisted on breaking up the nefarious system of feudalism and kingship by divine right. They loathed both him and his system. They plotted for his assassination, and intrigued with all the ferocity of wild animals against his humane and enlightened government. He trampled over all their satanic dodges to overthrow the power ...
— The Tragedy of St. Helena • Walter Runciman
... power supporting a galling religious tyranny, and be marked as a rebellious freethinker in a generation of slavish conformists, this motive could scarcely fail to exhibit results. Some of the radical revolutionists of the present time say that the doctrine of the divine right of kings and the infallible authority of the priesthood is the living core of the power of tyranny in the world. They therefore deny God and futurity in order to overthrow their oppressors, who reign over them and prey upon them in the name of God and the pretended interests ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... co-operation and co, not sub-ordination of the public administration of industries. Remember that we are in America, where this administration will be quite different from that proposed in Europe where the Revolution of 1776 was not, and where "government" is one of divine right, authority, and force, and covers the all of life from the cradle to ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 23, October, 1891 • Various
... It is a plea for the survival of the fittest—for the strongest male to take possession of the herd by a process of extermination. If we examine this battle cry of political polemics, we find that it is based upon the conception of the divine right of property, and the preoccupation by older or more favored or more alert or richer men or nations, of territory, of the forces of nature, of machinery, of all the functions of what we call civilization. Some of these men, who are really great, follow ...
— Theodore Roosevelt - An Autobiography by Theodore Roosevelt • Theodore Roosevelt
... the time returning Crusaders brought back with them copies of Aristotle and other great Greek philosophers whose authority was still reverenced at Byzantium and Bagdad when London and Paris knew nothing of them. Out of the denial of one set of schoolmen that a divine right to rule, greater than that derived from the people, could exist in kings, grew the political controversy which preceded the English revolution against the Stuarts. Our revolution grew out of the English as the French grew out of ours, and in putting on his seal ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... in the land of the Slavonians were fortunate in being regarded as aliens in a country which, as we have seen, they inhabited long before those who claimed to be its possessors by divine right of conquest. If their position was precarious, their sufferings were those of a conquered nation. As the whim and fancy of the reigning prince, knyaz, varied, they were induced one day to settle in the country by the offer of the most flattering privileges, and the next ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... great friends. She discovered that his mother was a Frenchwoman, and this was a bond between them. She discovered also that Clem was artistic, that he was devotedly fond of music, that he could draw a little, paint a little, and she believed in the divine right of talent wherever it might be found to assert a claim of equality with those who were better born. The women in the country-side were shy of her; for the men she could not possibly care, and no doubt she must at times have got rather weary of her heavy husband ...
— Mark Rutherford's Deliverance • Mark Rutherford
... distinctly the member of a great class which was beginning to assert its independence of social authority. With all his loyalty to his king, he was at heart a republican in literature, and stoutly denied the divine right of patrons. His dictionary was the sign of literary emancipation; it was the witness to an intellectual freedom which might be in alliance with government, but could not be its tool. The history ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... lead people to conclude that the fool's money is the wise man's patrimony by divine right," ...
— The Firm of Nucingen • Honore de Balzac
... Matter, Form, and Power of a Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil," appeared in 1651. His special impulse to the construction of a science of politics came from the Great Rebellion, his detestation of the principles on which it was based, and his dissatisfaction with the theory of "divine right" as a bafis for the absolutism which he counted a necessity. The "Leviathan" is the commonwealth, or state, conceived as an "artificial man," and this gives the title to this famous work. But this essay towards a science of politics was ...
— The World's Greatest Books—Volume 14—Philosophy and Economics • Various |
