"Divine right" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... incarnations of Antichrist? Their Moloch sacrifices flame through all lands. The earth groans because of them, and refuses to cover the blood of her slain. And America is the new world of boundless wonder and beauty, wealth and fertility, to which these two evil powers arrogate an exclusive and divine right; and God has delivered it into their hands; and they have done evil therein with all their might, till the story of their greed and cruelty rings through all earth and heaven. Is this the will of God? Will he not avenge for these things, as surely as he is ...
— Sir Walter Raleigh and his Time from - "Plays and Puritans and Other Historical Essays" • Charles Kingsley
... set to work to preach this? I will answer this question by two others: How did Bossuet set to work to write his Politique tiree de l'Ecriture, to proclaim in the name of the Bible obligatory monarchy, divine right, the absolute authority of kings, the duty of destroying false religion by force, the duty of officially sustaining the truth, the duty of having a budget of modes of worship, the duty of uniting Church and State, without speaking of his Biblical apology for war, for the use of Louis ...
— The Uprising of a Great People • Count Agenor de Gasparin
... some of those with whom he was closely associated. No stranger brought into contact with Nicholas II. could help being attracted by his personal charm; but he was a reactionary surrounded by ultra-reactionaries and evil counsellors, who played upon his superstitions and his belief in the Divine Right of Kings and who brought him to his ruin together with his country. One had heard much in the past of the veneration in which Russians of all ranks and classes held their Sovereign as a matter of course. But, when brought into contact with Russian officers in 1916, one speedily realized ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... himself willing to take the sinning woman back to his bosom. "That she had sinned is certain," he said; "I do not believe she has sinned as some sin; but, whatever be her sin, it is for a man to forgive as he hopes for forgiveness." He expatiated on the absolute and almost divine right which it was intended that a husband should exercise over his wife, and quoted both the Old and New Testament in proof of his assertions. And then he went on to say that he appealed to public sympathy, through the public press, because, owing to some gross insufficiency in the laws ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope
... "And may I ask, Mr. Ames, by what right you own mines, and forests, and lands? Divine right, ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... children, how should she ever even think to yield? It was unthinkable. He, the man, the weak, the false, the treacherous, the half-hearted, it was he who must yield. Was not hers the divine will and the divine right? Ha, she would be less than woman if she ever capitulated, abandoned her divine responsibility as woman! No, he ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... fault of history. Enough that it may be a useful one. Toryism has undergone a process of inverse development which resembles decay, but which is merely an accommodation to the existing conditions of life and health. The figments which used to furnish it with sustenance are dead. The divine right of kings, which nourished as a sentiment long after it was disowned by the laws, has at last gone spark out. The divine rights of the Church have followed suit. The legal abuses which were clung to as a symbol of the unchangeableness of English institutions are being swept ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... well. He was the biggest in the school, and to hold his position among his fellows he had to defy me. As long as I watched him, he must lag. The louder I called, the deafer he must seem to be. His post was hemmed around by tradition. It was his by divine right, and it involved on its holder duties sometimes onerous, often dangerous; but for him to abate one iota of his privileges would be a reflection on his predecessors, an injustice to his heirs. It would mean scholastic ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... 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. ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various
... Temugin condescended to employ the arts of superstition; and it was from a naked prophet, who could ascend to heaven on a white horse, that he accepted the title of Zingis, [3] the most great; and a divine right to the conquest and dominion of the earth. In a general couroultai, or diet, he was seated on a felt, which was long afterwards revered as a relic, and solemnly proclaimed great khan, or emperor of the Moguls [4] and Tartars. ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... manner, that he was or had been one of that class. He had about him that haughty lack of manners which bespoke the aristocrat. I waxed very eloquent when, as I say, I got my mind really going. I spoke of kings and queens and their uses in no uncertain phrases, of divine right, of dukes, earls, marquises—of all the pompous establishments of British royalty and nobility—with that contemptuously humorous tolerance of a necessary and somewhat amusing evil which we find in American comic papers. We had a battle royal for about one hour, and I must confess ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... 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.'" "I ask you if it is not a false philosophy? Is it not a false statesmanship ...
— Abraham Lincoln, Vol. I. • John T. Morse
... Guy Johnson, fairly trembling with fury, "you deal very freely in damnation. Do you perhaps assume the divine right which you deny ...
— The Maid-At-Arms • Robert W. Chambers
... soldier of fortune," reflected he, "has an unseemly habit of overcoming and leading captive legitimate princes; thus prejudicing Divine right in the eyes of the vulgar. The skin of his predecessor Valerian, curried and stuffed with straw, hangs to this hour in the temple at Ctesiphon, a pleasing spectacle to the immortal gods. How would ...
— The Twilight of the Gods, and Other Tales • Richard Garnett
... exercised in His Name, is of course never heard of. The ruler is a public servant of the collective nation, and that is all. To introduce this notion among a people whose idea of government has run for thousands of years on the lines of absolute monarchy and hereditary if not divine right is nothing short of revolutionary. All idea of the sacredness of authority is at once gone. The Government is a thing to be dictated to by the people, to be threatened and bullied and even exterminated if it does not ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... having authority, because it speaks in the name and in behalf of the Almighty. From the first has it advanced this claim of unlimited empire; its prerogatives change not with the mutations of society. It still shows a charter of "divine right" for the sovereignty at which it aims. It still claims, as it always has demanded, and ever will demand till it shall acquire, dominion over all classes,—from the slave of toil to the heir of a throne, ...
— The Religion of Politics • Ezra S. Gannett
... doctrine 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 part in their meetings, the convention that sat a century ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge
... valid obstacle to their recognition; but Berenger felt himself bound by all home duties to return to England, nor had he clear convictions as to the absolute right of the war in which he had almost unconsciously drawn his sword. Under the Tudors the divine right of kings was strongly believed in, and it was with many genuine misgivings that the cause of Protestant revolt was favoured by Elisabeth and her ministers; and Berenger, bred up in a strong sense of loyalty, as well as in ...
— The Chaplet of Pearls • Charlotte M. Yonge
... generous, he considered. Just why all decisions should be made by him, as supreme arbiter, can hardly be explained, except that he had assumed that position three years before, when the other young Lanes had been negligible factors in all matters of business, and he, by the divine right of his twenty-one years, had, upon the death of his father, taken the management of the family affairs ...
— Strawberry Acres • Grace S. Richmond
... 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 of English literature since that date is a democratic history. ...
— Noah Webster - American Men of Letters • Horace E. Scudder
... 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 American woman. ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... American steamers, smart built, fast little boats, would instantly 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 ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... aristocracy, oppression, despotism, tyranny—these and all other devils of the old world order were bound for the limbo which awaits outworn, discredited social institutions. The Declaration of Independence officially proclaimed the new order,—challenging "divine right" and maintaining that "all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, ...
— The American Empire • Scott Nearing
... 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, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various
... the restraint of the baser Press which, for mere pelf, spurs the passions of the multitude instead of curbing them; and, finally, to deliverance from the 'all- potent wills of Little Fathers by Divine right,' and from the ignoble ambition of bullet-headed uncles and brothers and cousins - a curse from which England, thank the Gods! is, and let us hope, ever will be, free. But there are more countries than one ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... it seems, made no distinctions between opinions and acts. They did not hold that there was any divine right in man to think what he pleased, and to say what he thought. Bunyan had suffered as a martyr; but it was as a martyr for truth, not for general licence. The genuine Protestants never denied that it was right to prohibit men from teaching lies, and to punish ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... not a friend of yours! Divine right of landowners to lead 'the Land' by the nose! ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... his accession asserted the divine right, and his legislation, other than special bills for the restoration of attainted persons, or the confirmation of titles, is scanty, his reign being principally occupied with the conflict with Parliament, ...
— Popular Law-making • Frederic Jesup Stimson
... years past could ever have expected Lady Coryston to step down from anything. Although she had brought but a very modest dowry, such from earliest days had been the strength and dominance of her character, that her divine right of rule in the family had never been seriously questioned by any of her children except Coryston; although James, who had inherited money from his grandmother, was entirely independent of her, and by the help of a detached and humorous mind could often make his ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... recognize the divine right of kings. Our nation elected the Hapsburgs to the throne of Bohemia of its own free will, and by the same right deposes them. We hereby declare the Hapsburg dynasty unworthy of leading our nation, and deny ...
— Winning a Cause - World War Stories • John Gilbert Thompson and Inez Bigwood
... 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 conscience to-day. The worker was expected not only ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells
... invader)—entered Japan, and assumed the control of its destinies. He called himself "Mikado," and established his court at Miako, in Nipon, the largest of the group of islands, where he built temples and palaces, both spiritual and secular. Claiming to rule by divine right, he exercised the sole functions of the government, which, upon his death, descended to his heir, and thenceforward in direct order of succession. The Mikado, by reason of his superhuman dignities, was invested with a sanctity ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 32, June, 1860 • Various
... with all the accrued advantages to the Prussian monarch; and while the talk went on Bismarck manoeuvered to enlist his old enemy, Austria, to make common cause in a clear way of plunder, if ever there was one. Then, they swept the country with fire and sword, took it by the "divine right" of the strongest; and it fell out that Bismarck stacked the cards against Austria, as a gambler stacks them against the man on the other side of the table who is supposed to be his friend, in a gentleman's game. Bismarck at a stroke thus won ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... smug contentment, then, in the feudal countries which is the surest bulwark of the "divine right of kings"—and courtiers! A pleasantly distended belly, a mellow thrill from cheap wine, a certainty about the repetition of regular meals and drinks, with enough clothes and shelter to maintain relative positions with the neighbors—this ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard
... once left 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 Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 3. (of 4) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... make speeches which have been written for you by your ministers. Well, decent people respect you for it; but it has its drawbacks; the crowd prefers the other thing occasionally;—it likes still to pretend, at moments of ceremony, that it believes in divine right and the hereditary principle, and so forth; and where it likes to pretend, the press and the Government are always ready to play into its hands. Yes; it's a mixture; you must attend sometimes to the unrealities,—then, with your real moments, ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman
... days of her pride and power would never tolerate any heresy to her creed, whose formula of statement might have been written we believe in the divine right of the Master, to take advantage of the weakness, ignorance, and poverty of the slave; that might makes right, and that success belongs to ...
— Minnie's Sacrifice • Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
... monarchy was so little at variance with democracy, that democracy on the contrary only attained its completion and fulfilment by means of that monarchy. For this monarchy was not the Oriental despotism of divine right, but a monarchy such as Gaius Gracchus wished to found, such as Pericles and Cromwell founded— the representation of the nation by the man in whom it puts supreme and unlimited confidence. The ideas, ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... mediaevalism. Does power descend from God, its primeval source; or does it ascend, delegated from the people? Once stated, the French mind with its intense lucidity and logicality saw the line of cleavage between old and new—divine right: or sovereignty of the people—and bade all men choose where they would stand. The Contrat Social with its consuming passion for social justice, its ideal of a state founded on the sovereignty of the people, became the gospel of the time. Men and women conned its pages by heart and slept with ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... that this sneer is often made: "The same class oppose us who defended the divine right of slavery." This is untrue so far as I am concerned. I was second to no man in condemnation of slavery, because the Bible condemned it. That one utterance, "God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton
... having, by divine right, in the whole church the primacy of honor and jurisdiction, mutual communication, as regards all spiritual things, and the ecclesiastical relations of the bishops, the clergy and the people with the Holy See, shall not be subject to the necessity of obtaining ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... 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 ahead, like ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... 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 ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... presenting a bird's-eye view of our history; and particularly of the various claims and privileges—and changes—of the monarchical branch of the Constitution. Some of these ceremonies, as we have seen, had their origin in those remote periods in which every believer in Revelation must accord "a divine right" to the kings of Judea; others are connected with the ancient hero-worship of our Pagan ancestors; while a third class perpetuate certain feudal rights and customs, of which they form the only distinct remaining traces. Some, again, are memorials of the triumph ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip
... Bessie, is naught but a miserable pedant, who loves nothing so well as hearing himself talk, and prating by the hour together on matters of law and religion, and on the divine right of kings. He is not the King such as England has been wont to know—a King to whom his subjects might gain access to plead his protection and ask his aid. I trow none but a fool would strive to win a smile from the Scottish James. He is scarce a man, by all we hear, let alone a King. ...
— The Lost Treasure of Trevlyn - A Story of the Days of the Gunpowder Plot • Evelyn Everett-Green
... shire, by the very appearance of the members of the Parliament in answer to his writ. "Why may I not balance this Providence," he asked, "with any hereditary interest?" In this national approval he saw a call from God, a Divine Right of a higher order than that of the kings who ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green
... world. He died indeed, overwhelmed; with the pathetic cry of utter defeat upon his lips. And the leading races of mankind have knelt ever since to the mighty spirit who dared not only to conceive and found the Kingdom of God, but to think of himself as its Spiritual King—by sheer divine right of service, of suffering, and of death! Only through tribulation and woe—through the peirasmos or sore trial of the world—according to Messianic belief, could the Kingdom be realized, and Messiah revealed. ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... small matter of a year and two months. Mrs. Tresslyn had set great store by him. Being a male child he did not present the grave difficulties that attend the successful launching and disposal of the female of the species to which the Tresslyn family belonged. He was born with the divine right to pick and choose, and that is something that at present appears to be denied the sisters of men. But the amiable George, at the age of one and twenty and while still a freshman in college, picked a girl without consulting his parent and in a jiffy put an end ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... asserting that 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 ...
— American Eloquence, Volume III. (of 4) - Studies In American Political History (1897) • Various
... systematic parliamentary Opposition offered to the Government of Elizabeth Question of the Monopolies Scotland and Ireland become Parts of the same Empire with England Diminution of the Importance of England after the Accession of James I Doctrine of Divine Right The Separation between the Church and the Puritans becomes wider Accession and Character of Charles I Tactics of the Opposition in the House of Commons Petition of Right Petition of Right violated; Character and Designs ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... Crown living, though there had been great demur at thus slipping into a friend's shoes, so that Dr. Woodford had been obliged to asseverate that nothing so much comforted him as leaving the parish in such hands, and that he blamed no man for seeing the question of Divine right as he did in common with the Non-jurors. The appointment opened the way to the marriage with Naomi Darpent, and the pair ...
— A Reputed Changeling • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Middle Ages from 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 World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various
... themselves on a level with their subjects, and by meeting them on their own ground, with their own weapons, giving occasion for comparisons, perhaps not altogether favourable to that theory of a superlative and divine difference which the doctrine of a divine right to rule naturally presupposes. 'For,' he says, 'neither is it enough for those who govern and command us, and have all the world in their hand, to have a common understanding, and to be able to do ...
— The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere Unfolded • Delia Bacon
... 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 without murmuring to the ...
— Equality • Edward Bellamy
... which are consistent with the immutable law of God; and any one of which, accordingly, may warrantably be adopted according to circumstances. But in the Church of God, only one form of government is of Divine right: every other is an invention of man, and destitute of authority. In the course of providence, the institutions of the Church, like the doctrines of religion, will receive accessions of rich illustration; but, like these heavenly doctrines—beyond ...
— The Ordinance of Covenanting • John Cunningham
... 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 greater ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... 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 ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... a grand element of character: it has won Olympic crowns and Isthmian laurels; it confers kinship with men who have vindicated their divine right to be held in the world's memory. Let the master passion of the soul evoke undaunted energy in pursuit of the attainment of one end, aiming for the highest in the spirit of the lowest, prompted by the burning thought of reward, which sooner ...
— Captains of Industry - or, Men of Business Who Did Something Besides Making Money • James Parton
... eighty-one years old, that he formally broke loose from the mother- church and Methodism was given a charter from the State. At this time John Wesley announced himself as a "Scriptural Episcopus," or a bishop by divine right, greatly to the consternation of his brother Charles. But the morning stars still sang together, even after he had ordained his comrade, Asbury, "Bishop of America" and conferred the title of bishop on a dozen others. It was always, however, carefully explained that they were merely Methodist-Episcopal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 9 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Reformers • Elbert Hubbard
... the shack and became a front and backyard; the landscape was situated and set right, knowing its right hand from its left. Four walls, a roof, and a door—all the things necessary to make a threshold, that magic line across which woman faces the world with the courage of divine right. At the end of a lonesome, laborious day she saw it; and she hurried to it with a sort of homing instinct. Opening the door, she gave a start and stepped back. Another's "things" were in it. Now what should she do? It was a question with half a dozen answers; and they ...
— The Wrong Woman • Charles D. Stewart
... and were dismayed to find that their bullets rebounded harmlessly. They solved the mystery later, discovering the hide on the skull of a dead bull to be an inch thick and covered with a mat of gnarled hair in itself almost a shield against bullets. Joel Rae, with the divine right of youth, drew for them from this circumstance ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... another part of the patrimony of the old Church on which Knox had a still stronger opinion—viz., the yearly tithes or Teinds. To these, in his view, that Church and its ministers had neither the divine right which they had claimed, nor any right at all. The 'commandment' of the State indeed had compelled men, often cruelly and unjustly, to pay them to the Church. But the State was now free to dispose of them ...
— John Knox • A. Taylor Innes
... women are arrested here every year. Fifty thousand pass through that basilisk's den we saw to-day. We have a hundred thousand child workers out of whose tender flesh we are coining gold. Three hundred thousand of our women are hewers of wood and drawers of water, robbed of their divine right of love and motherhood. There are twenty thousand children and fifty thousand men and women homeless in our streets. I have seen more than five hundred of them fighting for the chance of sleeping on the bare planks of a ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... refugee," as it is termed—he scarce knew what to do. His parent was too poor to send him money for his support. Besides, his father was not over well pleased with him. The old man was one of those who still clung to a belief in the divine right of kings, and was contented with the "powers that be," no matter how tyrannical they be. He was angry with Karl, for having made a fool of himself by turning patriot, or "rebel," as it pleases crowned monsters to term it. He had intended him for better things; a secretary ...
— The Plant Hunters - Adventures Among the Himalaya Mountains • Mayne Reid
... of Female Government had engaged his attention at an earlier period. One of his Questions submitted to BULLINGER in 1554 was "Whether a Female can preside over, and rule a kingdom by divine right?" And in answer to some doubts regarding the Apparel of Women, he himself says that "if women take upon them the office which GOD hath assigned to men, they shall not escape the Divine malediction." ...
— The First Blast of the Trumpet against the monstrous regiment - of Women • John Knox
... compromise. They told themselves, as all vanquished parties in all times have declared, that the luck of the conquerors would soon be at an end, that the Emperor had no support but that of the army, that the power de facto must sooner or later give way to the Divine Right, etc. So, in spite of the wise counsel given to them, they fell into the pitfall, which others, like old d'Hauteserre, more prudent and more amenable to reason, would have been able to avoid. If men were frank ...
— An Historical Mystery • Honore de Balzac
... 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 ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins
... tree of royal 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 ...
— Medieval Europe • H. W. C. Davis
... the distinction between the canonical and apocryphal books of the Scriptures. He asserts his divine right, as Bishop of Rome, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various
... moral warrant for their resistance to Charles I, or their 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 ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw
... history. The record of future joys and ills would have to be kept in double entry, for I felt with absolute conviction that I could entertain no project and decide no question without instinctively and naturally consulting the maiden who had quietly and as if by divine right obtained the mastery of my soul. But a day since I would have said that my present attitude was impossible, but now it seemed both right and inevitable. The doubt, the sense of strangeness and remoteness that we justly associate with a comparative ...
— A Day Of Fate • E. P. Roe
... fancies, swear eternal friendships, have eternal tiffs and squabbles, kiss and make up, fall out again, and as they grow in grace and wisdom they keep up the system, simply taking a new object every few months. It is one of their weaknesses by divine right, over which common sense has no more control than it has over ...
— Marion's Faith. • Charles King
... party met with no success. Of more importance was the fact that at Rome the old conditions, the old claims, and the old law were unforgotten. Developing the ideas of Leo I., Gelasius I. and Gregory the Great, Nicholas I. (858-867) drew a picture of the divine right and unlimited power of the bishop of Rome, which anticipated all that the greatest of his successors were, centuries later, actually to effect. The time had not, however, yet come for the establishment of the papal world-dominion. ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 6, Slice 3 - "Chitral" to "Cincinnati" • Various
... authorities that have been tried, divine right, and election, and heredity, and balloting, and assemblies and parliaments and senate—have all proved ineffectual. Everyone knows that not one of these methods attains the aim either of intrusting power only to the incorruptible, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... involved. In Scotland the decision was different. The battle fought in the 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 ACCOUNTABLE ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller
... people to be in 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 throttled by ...
— The Prime Minister • Anthony Trollope
... vital, that motion is the law of all things,—in fact, that we have got rid of the notions of the absolute, the fixed, the arbitrary, and the notion of origins and of the dualism of the world,—to what extent will these and kindred ideas modify art and all aesthetic production? The idea of the divine right of kings and the divine authority of priests is gone; that, in some other time or some other place God was nearer man than now and here,—this idea is gone. Indeed, the whole of man's spiritual and ...
— Whitman - A Study • John Burroughs
... fulcrum was strong enough as yet to stir the inert mass of traditional forms. Monarchs still flattered themselves with notions of paternal government and divine right; the nobility still claimed and exercised baseless privileges which had descended from an age when their ancestors held not merely these but the land on which they rested; the burgesses still hugged, ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane
... of the hearth-throne who had reigned wisely and contentedly, ennobling and refining humanity; and she proved by illustrious examples that the borders of the feminine realm could not be enlarged, without rendering the throne unsteady, and subverting God's law of order. Woman reigned by divine right only at home. If married, in the hearts of husband and children, and not in the gilded, bedizened palace of fashion, where thinly veiled vice and frivolity hold carnival, and social upas and social asps wave and trail. If single, ...
— St. Elmo • Augusta J. Evans
... 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 because ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey
... full. The spell of the unnatural civil power which had been enjoyed by the Papal prelates in this country remained with their Protestant successors until this Controversy broke it: so that from this time onwards the bishops set about to forge a new spell, 'the Divine Right of their temporal position and power', which hallucination was dissolved by the Long Parliament: from which time a bishop has usually been considered no more than a man" (Preface, ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D. D., Volume IV: - Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Volume II • Jonathan Swift
... showed towards English liberty in the time of the Stuarts; although it is abundantly evident that the dangers of a royal despotism, which were then so serious, have utterly disappeared, and that the political action of the Church of England at that period was mainly governed by a doctrine of the Divine right of kings, and of the duty of passive obedience, which is now as dead as the old belief that the king's touch could cure scrofula! How often have the champions of modern democracy appealed in support of their views to the glories of the democracies of ancient Greece, without ever reminding ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky
... 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
... 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 ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... their Backs; I thought fit to leave it where I found it, least our excellent Tracts of Sir Robert Filmer, Dr. Hammond L...y, S....l, and Others, who have so learnedly treated of the more useful Doctrine of Passive Obedience, Divine Right, &c. should be blasphem'd by the Mob, grow into Contempt of the People; and they should take upon them to question their Superiors for the Blood of ...
— The Consolidator • Daniel Defoe
... among that crew—such as Swinton, 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. ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne
... Rights in 1689 restored to the monarchy the character which it had lost under the Tudors and the Stuarts. The right of the people through its representatives to depose the King, to change the order of succession, and to set on the throne whom they would, was now established. All claim of divine right, or hereditary right independent of the law, was formally put an end to by the election of William and Mary. Since their day no English sovereign has been able to advance any claim to the crown save a claim which rested on a particular clause in a particular Act of ...
— Civil Government in the United States Considered with - Some Reference to Its Origins • John Fiske
... preface to have preceded by many years that of publication, 1649, we may perhaps regard the piece as more or less contemporary with Cowley's juvenile effort. There is, it is true, one passage,[336] treating of tyrants and revolutions, which is such as a moderate supporter of 'divine right' might have been expected to pen in the later days of the civil war; the publisher's words, however, are unequivocal, and can hardly refer to ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg
... respecting the Royal Family which I conceive it to be my duty to pass over in silence: It may be added, however, that the conversation lasted a long time, and to say the least of it, was by no means in favour of "divine right." ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton
... they create new epochs in history. Through Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force of earthquakes and the might ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... to-morrow. But the fall of Novaliches at the Bridge of Alcolea decided the fate not only of the ministry but of the dynasty; and while General Concha was waiting for the train to leave Madrid, Isabel of Bourbon and Divine Right were passing the Pyrenees. ...
— Castilian Days • John Hay
... 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 the instinct ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... 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 dissatisfied feudal serf. 2. The intellectuals, rationalists, political theorists. The ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... Venice, as well as the emperors of Germany, and some other heads of states, differed from other Christian sovereigns in this respect, that, instead of holding their high office by hereditary or divine right, they were installed therein by election. At Venice, a conclave, consisting of forty electors, appointed by a much more numerous body of men of high position, elected the Doge, or president of the ...
— Manners, Custom and Dress During the Middle Ages and During the Renaissance Period • Paul Lacroix
... are, very important and far-reaching, involved in any sort of kingship. We have all heard of "the divine right of kings." We all see—even if we cannot understand it—the love of peoples for a king. Even when the heads of states are called by some other name than king, the fact of kingship is still there. All this denotes the working ...
— Our Master • Bramwell Booth
... all the concentrated passion which her youth had for years been storing up against it. Catherine sat presently overwhelmed, bewildered. This language of a proud and tameless individuality, this modern gospel of the divine right of self-development—her soul loathed it! And yet, since that night in Marrisdale, there had been a new yearning in ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... or as she may more properly be called THE MOTHER BEE, is the common mother of the whole colony. She reigns therefore, most unquestionably, by a divine right, as every mother is, or ought to be, a queen in her own family. Her shape is entirely different from that of the other bees. While she is not near so bulky as a drone, her body is longer, and of a more tapering, or sugar-loaf form than that of a worker, so that she has somewhat ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth
... submission to the second empire and the subservience of the individual citizen to official superiority which still prevails so widely on the continent of Europe. The tremendous potency of the other subdued the victorious Normans to the conquered Saxon's conception of justice, rejected the claims of divine right by the Stewarts, established capacity for self-government upon the independence of individual character that knows no superior but the law, and supplied the amazing formative power which has molded, according to the course and practice of the common law, the thought and custom of the hundred ...
— Experiments in Government and the Essentials of the Constitution • Elihu Root
... body can't bring his rank up here with him. Divine right is a good-enough earthly romance, but it don't go, here. Kings drop down to the general level as soon as they reach the realms of grace. I knew Charles the Second very well—one of the most popular comedians ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake |
