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Updated: June 29, 2025
It was in Massachusetts, where the theocracy was strongest, that the resistance to Charles II. was most dogged and did most to prepare the way for the work of achieving political independence a century later. Naturally it was in Massachusetts at the same time that the faults of the theocracy were most conspicuous.
The most decided enlargement of the power of the theocracy was made in the general court which met at Boston in May, 1631, when it was resolved that the assistants need not be chosen afresh every year, but might keep their seats until removed by a special vote of the freemen.
It is this common impulse of the race which Henry VIII relies upon, and because he is in this their leader the English people forgets his absolutism, his cruel anger, his bloody revenges. The character of the English Reformation after the first tumultuous conflicts, the fierce essays of royal theocracy and Jesuit reactionism, set steadily towards Liberty of Conscience.
He regards this as a natural, and at one time almost an universal, stage of social progress, though admitting that it either never existed or speedily ceased in the two ancient nations to which mankind are chiefly indebted for being permanently progressive. We hold it doubtful if there ever existed what M. Comte means by a theocracy.
As his party constituted, in his eyes, this elect body, and was, in reality, the best party, composed of men who feared God, and were willing to be ruled by his laws, therefore his party, as he supposed, had a right to overturn thrones, and establish a new theocracy on earth. This notion was a delusion in England, and proved fatal to all those who were blinded by it. Not so in America.
At church conferences there is never a dissenting voice and at the polls always the same unanimous vote. The following quotations give an idea of how the power is placed in Utah and of what theocracy consists: Brigham Young said in the Tabernacle in 1869, "what is the greatest miracle that can be wrought before God, our Saviour, the angels, the inhabitants of the earth and the infernal regions?
Calvin founded a little theocracy in Geneva, modeled after the old testament, and succeeded in erecting the most detestable government that ever existed, except the one from which it was copied. Against all this intolerance, one man, a minister, raised his voice. The name of this man should never be forgotten. It was Castellio.
Let these ecclesiastical castles multiply; let them cover and command the land, well garrisoned with men of God, and then, despite all heresy and schism, theocracy will flourish, the earth shall yield her increase, and all people praise the Lord.... Bernard had the satisfaction of improving and extending monasticism to the utmost; of sewing together, with tolerable success, the rended vesture of the papacy; of suppressing a more popular and more scriptural Christianity for the benefit of his despotic order; of quenching for a time, by the extinction of Abelard, the spirit of free inquiry, and of seeing his ascetic and superhuman ideal of religion everywhere accepted as the genuine type of Christianity."
Surely it ought to be our first aim, to make the sense of His universal presence and transcendent worth, and of the self's responsibility to Him, dominant for the plastic youthful consciousness confided to our care: to introduce that consciousness into a world which is really a theocracy and encourage its aptitude for generous love?
Their demonstrations were opposed by the anti-Leicestrians, who cared not to see a Geneva theocracy in the place of the vanished Papacy. They had as little reverence in secular affairs for Calvinistic deacons as for the college of cardinals, and would as soon accept the infallibility of Sixtus V. as that of Herman Modet.
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