stitution of states, or a confederation of nations provided with powers, legislative and executive, for preserving their peace and mutual welfare; yet it is evident upon the foregoing principles, and from the demands of reason and science, that a universal government, vested with power and authority to defend the rights, avenge the wrongs, and preserve the balance of nations, depends upon the same principles of polity and equity as those of individual man: there are, accordingly, certain recognized international laws by which states affect to be regulated, but they are powerless and without an executive. 1471. A community, or confederation of Nations, is, however, susceptible of the same modes and forms of government as a community of individuals. Accordingly, the world may be ruled by a single nation Autocratically, or imperially; or by an alliance of the principal states, Aristocratically; or by a representation of every people in council, Democratically: the vicious extreme of all which, and of all the most unhappy for mankind, is that of which the world has witnessed some partially successful, but vain endeavours, in which the Ruler of a single realm, favoured by the genius of war, and supported by the barbarism of the species, has attempted the Despotism of the World. 1472. Nor can the world be freed from this danger, nor national policy proceed beneficially for mankind, until the pure principles of individual morality are introduced into the transactions of states. Nor will Politics much improve in practice till the ministers of states, and the members of public assemblies, make it a principle not to do that as a body which they would not, and ought not, to do as individuals; nor to do that in the dark they would not avow in the light. Nor, finally, will a people long hold together in political union, among whom morals cease to be esteemed; for dissolution inevitably terminates the course of dissoluteness. 1473. We have thus run rapidly over the ground of Politics, and traced their relations from particular, or domestic government, to universal government, or the Law of Nations, in which the reciprocal duties and interests of all men concur, subordinate only to the law of God, or universal Theocracy, which is suited only to the perfection of mankind, and is final in Politics, and connects them with Religion or Theology, to which we proceed. CHAPTER IV. OF THEOLOGY. SECTION I. 1474. THE last of the Ethical Sciences, and the pinnacle of all science, is RELIGION OF THEOLOGY, it being the science of the relations of created intelligences with the Self-subsistent Intellect, or of human consciousness with the Divine, or of Man universally with GOD. 1475. It has appeared, accordingly, that all religious effects depend upon the concurrence of the will of man with the will of God; an inquiry, therefore, concerning the true signification and conception of Deity, is the first essential of Theology; next to which is the inquiry into the nature of Man, and his relation to God: to which succeed the forms of the science, and the logical modes through which man seeks the knowledge of God on the ground of science, in harmony with divine revelation. 1476. Without such first inquiry, the chief object of religion- The Supreme Being-though |