we Christians, if in a position of responsibility, believe that we are all divinely appointed to the work each of us has to do:  instruments of God, who shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may.  The Emperor finely says of the Almighty:  “He breathed into man His breath, that is a portion of Himself, a soul.”  Reason is what chiefly distinguishes man from the brute, though there are those who hold that reason is but a higher form of brutish instinct, which again has its degree among the brutes; but, assuming that reason is of divine origin, enabling us to receive, by one means or another, the dictates of the Almighty, it seems clear that there must be channels through which these dictates become known to us.

This conveyance, this making plain is, as many people, and the Emperor among them, believe, performed by God through the agency of those whom mankind agree to call “great.”  For the last nineteen centuries a large part of civilized mankind is at one in the belief that Christ was such an agency, while millions again agree to call the agency Buddha, Mahomet, Confucius, or Zoroaster.  In the creed of Islam Christ, as a prophet, comes fifth from Adam.  In America there are thousands who believe, or did believe, in the agency of a Mrs. Eddy or a Dr. Dowie.  And if this is so in matters of religion, itself only a form of the reasoning soul, why should it not be the same in morals or philosophy, art or science, government or administration:  why should we not all accept, as many still do, the sayings and writings of the Hebrew prophets (as does the Emperor), of Plato and Aristotle, of Bacon and Hobbes, of Milton and Shakespeare and Goethe, of Kepler and Galileo, or Charlemagne and Napoleon, as divinely intended to convey and make plain to us the dictates of Heaven until such time as yet greater souls shall instruct us afresh and still more fully?

It may be that the Emperor thinks in some such way; his speeches and edicts at least suggest it.  Certainly, as already mentioned, he did on one occasion, when speaking of his kingship, employ the word “right” as descriptive of the nature of his appointment by God.  But that was early in his reign, and at no time since has he insisted on a Heaven-granted right to rule.  It was, no doubt, different with some of his absolute predecessors, but it was not the view of Frederick the Great, who declared himself “the first servant of the State.”  Moreover, it is hardly conceivable that the Emperor, who is acquainted with the facts of history and is a man of practical common sense besides, does not know that the doctrine of “divine right” has long been rejected by people of intelligence in every civilized country, including his own.