Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/118

104 Either Republicans or liars. There is no middle course."

This is the gigantic lie of a limited monarchy, the fact that an absolute monarchy can only be changed into a limited, constitutional monarchy, by denying the divine origin of the royal authority, thus removing its entire foundation and leaving it suspended in the air like Mahomet's coffin. During the Middle Ages the authority of the king was often intrenched upon; the nobles rose in insurrection again and again, striving to deprive him of some of his power and prerogatives. But this limitation of the royal authority, these insurrections against the crown were not founded upon any principle that contradicted the divine origin of the royal privileges; they had nothing to do with the sovereignty of the people. The barons acknowledged voluntarily that the king owed his authority to the grace of God, even when they were besieging him in his castle, but they maintained at the same time, that the grace of God had smiled upon them also. This was no denial but merely an ingenious extension of the doctrine of the supernatural authority of those in power. As the monarch asserted that he was king by the grace of God, they declared that they were barons by the grace of God. It was like the monomaniac who imagined that he was God. When another lunatic was brought to the asylum, whose mania took the same form, he began to ridicule the absurdity of the latter's pretensions. "As if that creature could be God!" he cried. "And why not?" enquired the attendant who thought his first patient was almost cured. "Because there can not be two Gods, of course, and as I am God, he can not be." Like this monomaniac the nobles intrenched upon the divine prerogatives of the crown, not in the name of reason, but owing to the vagaries of their own imagination. This made the mediæval belief in the divine authority of the king and