Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/112

98 would be the height of folly. The general familiarity with the historical facts connected with the beginnings of the different dynasties, some of whom originated hardly more than an hour ago, under the eye of some prosaic newspaper reporter, the spectacle occurring more and more frequently, of the deposition of legitimate sovereigns from their God-given positions, the small amount of respect shown by anointed kings to the supernatural rights of their fellow-monarchs—these facts combine to make it even more difficult for a Christian than for an atheist, to believe that the grace of God placed the crowns upon the heads of the potentates of Christendom. The grace of God can not be intermittent! It can not sustain a king one day and abandon him the next! Such ideas are so frivolous that the cherished convictions of a conscientious believer in God rise in rebellion against them. The entire fiction of the grace of God bestowed upon monarchs seems to an enlightened man like one of those old jokes which the soothsayers of ancient Rome used to repeat to each other with a solemn face, but a wink of sly understanding; to the religious man it is a blasphemous farce. Where the former would have the right to smile, the latter would grow indignant.

Let me now drop this discussion of the origin and legitimate authority of the reigning dynasties. I will continue, accepting as truths all that they claim to be true, and assuming the solemn aspect of a conjurer plying his trade. I accept therefore as demonstrated to be the actual fact, that the king is born with the authority to command me; I, the subject, am born with the duty to obey; God has arranged it thus, and, if I resist, I am blasphemously attacking His designs in regard to the universe. Proceeding from this point I find myself at the very next step in the midst of this grand lie of a