Heroes and Hero Worship [100]
something true, which it is important for us and all men to keep in mind. To assert that in whatever man you chose to lay hold of (by this or the other plan of clutching at him); and claps a round piece of metal on the head of, and called King,--there straightway came to reside a divine virtue, so that _he_ became a kind of god, and a Divinity inspired him with faculty and right to rule over you to all lengths: this,--what can we do with this but leave it to rot silently in the Public Libraries? But I will say withal, and that is what these Divine-right men meant, That in Kings, and in all human Authorities, and relations that men god-created can form among each other, there is verily either a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong; one or the other of these two! For it is false altogether, what the last Sceptical Century taught us, that this world is a steam-engine. There is a God in this world; and a God's-sanction, or else the violation of such, does look out from all ruling and obedience, from all moral acts of men. There is no act more moral between men than that of rule and obedience. Woe to him that claims obedience when it is not due; woe to him that refuses it when it is! God's law is in that, I say, however the Parchment-laws may run: there is a Divine Right or else a Diabolic Wrong at the heart of every claim that one man makes upon another.
It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people _called_ Kings. I say, Find me the true _Konning_, King, or Able-man, and he _has_ a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something of the Pontiff in him,--guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the _King_ is head of the _Church_.--But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.
Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to _seek_, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not the French Revolution; that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It were truer to say, the _beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in the Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did _not_ now do: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast _away_ his plummet; said to himself, "What is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not still sound strange to many of us, the assertion that there _is_ a God's-truth in the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an "expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what!--
From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled _Papa_, you are no Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite language!"--from that onwards to the shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Aux armes_!" when the people had burst up against _all_ manner
It can do none of us harm to reflect on this: in all the relations of life it will concern us; in Loyalty and Royalty, the highest of these. I esteem the modern error, That all goes by self-interest and the checking and balancing of greedy knaveries, and that in short, there is nothing divine whatever in the association of men, a still more despicable error, natural as it is to an unbelieving century, than that of a "divine right" in people _called_ Kings. I say, Find me the true _Konning_, King, or Able-man, and he _has_ a divine right over me. That we knew in some tolerable measure how to find him, and that all men were ready to acknowledge his divine right when found: this is precisely the healing which a sick world is everywhere, in these ages, seeking after! The true King, as guide of the practical, has ever something of the Pontiff in him,--guide of the spiritual, from which all practice has its rise. This too is a true saying, That the _King_ is head of the _Church_.--But we will leave the Polemic stuff of a dead century to lie quiet on its bookshelves.
Certainly it is a fearful business, that of having your Ableman to _seek_, and not knowing in what manner to proceed about it! That is the world's sad predicament in these times of ours. They are times of revolution, and have long been. The bricklayer with his bricks, no longer heedful of plummet or the law of gravitation, have toppled, tumbled, and it all welters as we see! But the beginning of it was not the French Revolution; that is rather the _end_, we can hope. It were truer to say, the _beginning_ was three centuries farther back: in the Reformation of Luther. That the thing which still called itself Christian Church had become a Falsehood, and brazenly went about pretending to pardon men's sins for metallic coined money, and to do much else which in the everlasting truth of Nature it did _not_ now do: here lay the vital malady. The inward being wrong, all outward went ever more and more wrong. Belief died away; all was Doubt, Disbelief. The builder cast _away_ his plummet; said to himself, "What is gravitation? Brick lies on brick there!" Alas, does it not still sound strange to many of us, the assertion that there _is_ a God's-truth in the business of god-created men; that all is not a kind of grimace, an "expediency," diplomacy, one knows not what!--
From that first necessary assertion of Luther's, "You, self-styled _Papa_, you are no Father in God at all; you are--a Chimera, whom I know not how to name in polite language!"--from that onwards to the shout which rose round Camille Desmoulins in the Palais-Royal, "_Aux armes_!" when the people had burst up against _all_ manner