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Can we wonder then that Bunyan uses hard words. He felt that state hierarchies were anti-christian; their fruit declared that those who supported them by such cruelties were aliens and enemies to the church of Christ. As a theological treatise, this of the Pharisee and Publican is invaluable. It is clear and perfectly intelligible to every candid and prayerful inquirer.
Formerly the hierarchies of power in the universe and on earth were inexplicable to him all out of order; but here, where he saw by degrees ignorant, almost animal intelligence, being directed by greater, shrewder, and at times it seemed to him possibly malicious intelligences he was not quite sure about that who were so strong that the weaker ones must obey them, he began to imagine that in a rough way life might possibly be ordered to the best advantage even under this system.
The splendour, power, and intolerance of national hierarchies is mistaken for the humble benignity of the Bible system of Christianity or personal religion. Antichrist, tricked out in robes and gewgaws, is, by perverted minds, received as Christ. Ed. This is exemplified in Bunyan's experience, published by him in Grace Abounding. Ed.
Certainly, I never saw sun-sets resembling those, nor could have conceived of aught so flamboyant, extravagant, and bewitched: for the whole heaven seemed turned into an arena for warring Hierarchies, warring for the universe, or it was like the wild countenance of God defeated, and flying marred and bloody from His enemies.
In those days there was a popish saint, one St Michael, that was held in wonderful love and adoration by all the ranks and hierarchies of the ecclesiastical locust then in Lithgow; indeed, for that matter, they ascribed to him power and dominion over the whole town, lauding and worshipping him as their special god and protector.
A highly aristocratic Court, possessing one of the most complicated and jealously protected hierarchies in the world, and presided over by a monarch claiming direct descent from the sacred Jimmu Tenno of twenty-five hundred years ago, decrees to-day precisely as before, the elaborate ritual governing every move, every decision and every agreement.
But just as there grew up governing hierarchies which were invisible in theory, so there has been a large amount of constructive adaptation, also unaccounted for in the image of democracy. Ways have been found to represent many interests and functions that are normally out of sight.
For a policy maker in the White House or Pentagon and the concerned Member of Congress with responsibility for providing for the common defense, what lessons emerge from these examples and hierarchies? First, there are always broader sets of operational concepts and constructs available for achieving political objectives than may be realized.
It poured itself over all things, raised them up and divided them according to the Hierarchies, according to the orders, and according to Providence. Then that-which-was separated itself from that-which-was-not, and that-which-was-not was the evil manifested in matter; and the Robe of Power severed that-which-was from that-which-was-not.
As to the second, of which the name does not occur in treatises on gems, it may be identified with chalcedony, which is described as a sort of agate of an opaque quality, dimmed with clouds and flashing fires in the shadows. "To have done with this emblematical jewelry, we may add that the series of stones serves to symbolize the hierarchies of the angels.
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