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Divine right   /dɪvˈaɪn raɪt/   Listen
Divine right

noun
1.
The doctrine that kings derive their right to rule directly from God and are not accountable to their subjects; rebellion is the worst of political crimes.  Synonym: divine right of kings.






WordNet 3.0 © 2010 Princeton University








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"Divine right" Quotes from Famous Books



... Parliament; but it is held by jurists that every Parliament is sovereign and has the power of repealing any act of any former Parliament. The beneficial rule of some of the latter monarchs of this family has endeared them to the people, but the doctrine of reigning by divine right, the favorite idea of the Stuarts, is nullified, when the monarch ascends the throne by statute law and not by ...
— Landholding In England • Joseph Fisher

... factor in bringing about this extraordinary change in public opinion. Hostile criticism of the Constitution soon "gave place to an undiscriminating and almost blind worship of its principles ... and criticism was estopped.... The divine right of kings never ran a more prosperous course than did this unquestioned prerogative of the Constitution to receive universal homage. The conviction that our institutions were the best in the world, nay more, the model to which all civilized ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... 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 ...
— The No Breakfast Plan and the Fasting-Cure • Edward Hooker Dewey

... daybreak we tied up to the iron wharf. As the capital of the government Boma contains the residence and gardens of the governor, who is the personal representative of Leopold, both as a shopkeeper and as a king by divine right. He is a figurehead. The real administrator is M. Vandamme, the Secretaire-General, the ubiquitous, the mysterious, whose name before you leave Southampton is in the air, of whom all men, whether they speak in French or English, speak well. It is from Boma that M. Vandamme ...
— The Congo and Coasts of Africa • Richard Harding Davis

... 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 TO NONE; while Sir ...
— Leading Articles on Various Subjects • Hugh Miller

... us a universe presided over by an infinite autocrat—a universe without republicanism, without democracy—a universe where all power comes from one and the same source, and where everyone using authority is accountable, not to the people, but to this supposed source of authority. Kings reign by divine right. Priests are ordained in a divinely appointed way—they do not get their office from man. Man is their servant, ...
— The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, Volume VIII. - Interviews • Robert Green Ingersoll

... 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 ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... declares emphatically that the throne belongs to David and his descendants by real 'divine right,' and that God's choice is Solomon, who is to inherit both the promises and obligations of the office, and, among the latter, that of building the Temple. The unspoken inference is that loyalty to Solomon would be obedience to Jehovah. The connection ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... between Rome and Nemi would be still closer. At both places the sacred kings, the living representatives of the godhead, would thus be liable to suffer deposition and death at the hand of any resolute man who could prove his divine right to the holy office by the strong arm and the sharp sword. It would not be surprising if among the early Latins the claim to the kingdom should often have been settled by single combat; for down to historical times the Umbrians regularly submitted their private disputes ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... antecedent of new and more lasting combinations. One thing is certain, that there is not a single code now in existence which is not false; that the graduation of the vices and virtues is wrong, and that in the future it will be altered. We must not hand ourselves over to a despotism with no Divine right, even if there be a risk of anarchy. In the determination of our own action, and in our criticism of other people, we must use the whole of ourselves and not mere fragments. If we do this we need not fear. We may suppose we are in danger because the stone tables of the Decalogue have gone to dust, ...
— Pages from a Journal with Other Papers • Mark Rutherford

... did not the North let the slave states go in peace?" Brown freely admitted the right of revolution. "The world no longer believes in the divine right of either kings or presidents to govern wrong; but those who seek to change an established government by force of arms assume a fearful responsibility—a responsibility which nothing but the clearest and most intolerable injustice ...
— George Brown • John Lewis

... lever nor 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, as something which ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane

... act in their favour. He then entered into details 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." ...
— Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte, Complete • Louis Antoine Fauvelet de Bourrienne

... Everywhere the great minds are investigating the creeds and the superstitions of men—the phenomena of nature, and the laws of things. At the head of this great army of investigators stood Humboldt—the serene leader of an intellectual host—a king by the suffrage of science, and the divine right of genius. ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Volume I • Robert Green Ingersoll

... from town. Mr. Newby, one of the missionaries stationed at this place, is the oldest preacher of the Gospel in the island. He has been in Antigua for twenty-seven years. He is quite of the old way of thinking on all subjects, especially the divine right of kings, and the scriptural sanction of slavery. Nevertheless, he was persuaded that emancipation had been a great blessing to the island and to all parties concerned. When he first came to Antigua in 1809, he was not suffered to teach the slaves. ...
— The Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... solely on the new birth, or salvation. Since the individual church was the local embodiment of the general church, none but the saved could properly become members thereof, and all who were truly saved (in the same locality) belonged to it by divine right. At this point, however, the human element in the constitution of the local church became manifest. We have pointed out the divine element in the true church—the element that particularly distinguished it as the church of God, but the bringing together of many individuals in one assembly involved ...
— The Last Reformation • F. G. [Frederick George] Smith

... then invested with the privilege of being more important than the rest and the causes of all the others. This is about as illegitimate as to choose among men a few individuals to whom is attributed the privilege of commanding others by divine right. These privileged sensations which belong to the sight, the touch, and the muscular sense, and which are of large extent, are indeed extensive. They have been unduly considered as objective and as representing matter because they are better known ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet

... Statutes regulating the powers of the Monarch and promulgated at the time of the Revolution of 1688, for example, "The Bill of Rights," we have a crowned Republic with a royal and hereditary President. We talk about the King being Sovereign "by Divine Right" and "by the Grace of God," but, of course, in fact, the King's title is a purely Parliamentary one, and is derived from an Act of Parliament—an Act of Parliament which settles the Throne upon "the heirs of the body of the Electress Sophia," who shall ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey

... hard, stony plateau, the fertility and riches of which succumb chiefly to an all-devouring priesthood. Cold lead plays too large a part in the history of Mexico, but certainly its most unjust verdict was not the extinction of the "divine right" in the person of this self-styled descendant of the Caesars at the hands of an Indian of Oaxaca. To-day a brown stone chapel, erected by Austria, stands where Maximilian fell, but the spot remains otherwise unchanged, and no doubt the fathers of these same peons who toiled ...
— Tramping Through Mexico, Guatemala and Honduras - Being the Random Notes of an Incurable Vagabond • Harry A. Franck

... over the sky!' said the King, a young man, whose divine right was never questioned by his female subjects. 'What a commotion in the waters, and what a wind he snorts forth! It certainly must be the largest fish that exists. I remember my father telling me that a monstrous fish once got ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli

... advises the Magi of it, and they hasten to adore the Infant who creates the Future. It is by means of the Intelligence of the Hierarchy and the practice of obedience, that one obtains Initiation. If the Rulers have the Divine Right to govern, the ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... as distinguished from authority. Democratic ideals can be attained only where those who govern exercise their power not by alleged divine right or inheritance, but by force of character and intelligence. Such a condition implies the attainment by citizens generally of relatively high moral and intellectual standards; and such a condition actually existed among the Jews. These men who ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various

... if it were desired, it would be impossible to confine the change to a partial expropriation. Once the principle of the "Divine Right of Property" is shaken, no amount of theorizing will prevent its overthrow, here by the slaves of the field, there by the ...
— The Conquest of Bread • Peter Kropotkin

... of their dealings with the Portuguese I find not a single instance where the Hindu kings broke faith with the intruders,[287] but as much cannot, I fear, be said on the other side. The Europeans seemed to think that they had a divine right to the pillage, robbery, and massacre of the natives of India. Not to mince matters, their whole record is one of a series of atrocities. It is sad to turn from the description given us by Paes of the friendship felt for the Portuguese, and especially for Christovao de Figueiredo, by ...
— A Forgotten Empire: Vijayanagar; A Contribution to the History of India • Robert Sewell

... thought, the quarrels on Jansenism, had alienated the Jansenists and their adherents, from the Pope, much more, than they had done, in reality. He was willing to concede, to the Pope, a primacy of rank and honour, but would by no means allow him, a primacy of jurisdiction, or any primacy, by divine right. On the other points, he seemed to have thought, that they might come to an agreement, on what they should declare, to be the fundamental doctrine of the churches, and adopt, on every other point of doctrine, a ...
— The Life of Hugo Grotius • Charles Butler

... tramped with knapsack on back across the Alps. The habit of his mind was that of the naturalist-investigator. Geology, botany and zoology were his properties by divine right. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard

... successor, and thereby bequeathed an 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, intrigue, and at length assassination; his sons, ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 5 • Various

... assembly of the world's royalty under the shadow of Peter's Throne, nor the appalling danger that its presence constituted in the midst of a democratic world. That world, he knew, affected to laugh at the folly and the childishness of it all—at the desperate play-acting of Divine Right on the part of fallen and despised families; but the same world, he knew very well, had not yet lost quite all its sentiment; and if that sentiment should happen ...
— Lord of the World • Robert Hugh Benson

... Orpheus is freed from the annoyance of a rival. He reigns by the divine right of his violin, the undisturbed monarch of his native plains. His name is pronounced with enthusiasm from one flat end of Holland to the other. In the splendour of his triumphal condition, he has forgotten his compact with Beelzebub; but Maina reminded him of it one day, when she told him ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 334, August 1843 • Various

... respecting the lawfulness of acknowledging the queen's supremacy: on the other hand, the attempts of sir Francis Knowles to inspire her majesty with jealousy of the designs of the archbishop, by whom some advances were made towards claiming for the episcopal order an authority by divine right, independently of the appointment of the head of the church, failed entirely of success. No ecclesiastic had ever been able to acquire so great an ascendency over the mind of Elizabeth as Whitgift; there was a conformity in their views, and in some points ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... Prester John, had corresponded with the Roman pontiff and the princes of Europe. The ambition of 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

... like a second John the Baptist at the courts of kings and princes, and there boldly denounced vice and misrule. It was not difficult for a Chinese scholar and teacher to find access to the highest of the land. The Chinese believed in the divine right of learning, just as they believed in the divine right of kings. Mang employed every weapon of persuasion in trying to combat heresy and oppression; alternately ridiculing and reproving: now appealing in a burst of moral ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... above most of her companions, conscious of superior charms, always admired and flattered, and, since she left the Convent, worshipped as the idol of the gay gallants of the city, and the despair and envy of her own sex. She was a born sovereign of men, and she felt it. It was her divine right to be preferred. She trod the earth with dainty feet, and a step aspiring as that of the fair Louise de La Valliere when she danced in the royal ballet in the forest of Fontainebleau and stole a king's heart by the flashes ...
— The Golden Dog - Le Chien d'Or • William Kirby

... communities which escaped this delusion, that man is indebted for being now a progressive being. The fundamental institutions of the state were almost everywhere believed to have been divinely established, and to be still, in a greater or less degree, of divine authority. The divine right of certain lines of kings to rule, and even to rule absolutely, was but lately the creed of the dominant party in most countries of Europe; while the divine right of popes and bishops to dictate men's beliefs ...
— Auguste Comte and Positivism • John-Stuart Mill

... cruel brigand who had long held the city in terror were delivered over to them bound and in chains." For nearly thirty years this blood-stained miscreant had reigned over his hapless people in a sovereign plenitude of power, which by the theory of German imperialism in our day is still a divine right. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... said to begin with the Revolution of 1688; for, with its completion, the dogma of Divine Right disappeared for ever from English politics. Its place was but partially filled until Hume and Burke supplied the outlines of a new philosophy. For the observer of this age can hardly fail, as he notes its relative barrenness of abstract ...
— Political Thought in England from Locke to Bentham • Harold J. Laski

... 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

... have merely followed in the wake of their predecessors. But, indeed, they were fitted to be Americans from the very start; they were kinsfolk of the Covenanters; they deemed it a religious duty to interpret their own Bible, and held for a divine right the election of their own clergy. For generations their whole ecclesiastic and scholastic systems had been fundamentally democratic. In the hard life of the frontier they lost much of their religion, ...
— The Winning of the West, Volume One - From the Alleghanies to the Mississippi, 1769-1776 • Theodore Roosevelt

... They had no sympathy, no knowledge, no experience. He who would touch the hearts of men must have had his own heart seared. The missionaries of mankind have ever been great sinners before they earned the divine right to heal and bless. Their weakness was made their strength, and out of their own agony of repentance came the knowledge which made them masters and saviours of their kind. It was the agony of the Garden and the Cross that gave to the world's Preacher His kingdom ...
— For the Term of His Natural Life • Marcus Clarke

... Their Republican Spirit No 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; ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... Pope would yield this point, so as not to be supreme by divine right or from Gods command, but that we must have [there must be elected] a [certain] head, to whom all the rest adhere [as their support] in order that the [concord and] unity of Christians may be preserved against sects and heretics, and that such a head were chosen by men, and that it were placed within ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther

... James Oliver. He was a commanding figure, with the face and front of a man in whom there was no parley. He was a good man to agree with. In any emergency, even up to his eightieth year, he would have at once taken charge of affairs by divine right. His voice was the voice ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen • Elbert Hubbard

... of men under the earth, and reaching up to the institution of a recall for the angel Gabriel, and a referendum for the Day of Judgment, was undreamed of. The chiefs of the clans, the chiefs of the tribes, the kings of the Germans, and finally the emperors were all elective. The divine right of kings is a purely modern development. The descendants of these German tribes in England, elected their king in the days of William the Conqueror even, and as late as 1689 the Commons of England voted that King James had abdicated, and that ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier

... of the Just is perpetually being disturbed by strife and jealousies among those who ought to be one, even as Christ and the Father are One. There, as it has been well observed, "the Church stands upon her own merits, her own divine right; there all the attested grievances of the Dissenters, secular and political, are removed; no tithes, no church-rates, no exclusive state support." And yet there, it may be added, the fierce contentious spirit which rages in England ...
— Australia, its history and present condition • William Pridden

... the people take up arms it is well. War is the torch of liberty in the hands of the people. Oh, I envy the people, who are so strong, yet know it not. If I were a man I would teach the people that a king has no divine right, save when it is conferred ...
— Arms and the Woman • Harold MacGrath

... to whether there is such a thing as divine right of kings is not settled in this book. It was found too difficult. That the executive head of a nation should be a person of lofty character and extraordinary ability, was manifest and indisputable; that none but the Deity could select that head unerringly, was also manifest and indisputable; ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... 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 ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... and the second volume of Tolstoi's War and Peace, which he bought at a second-hand book-stall for five cents. He became interested in popular and inaccurate French and English histories, and secreted any amount of footnote anecdotes about Guy Fawkes and rush-lights and the divine right of kings. He thought almost every night about making friends, which he intended—just as much as ever—to do as ...
— Our Mr. Wrenn - The Romantic Adventures of a Gentle Man • Sinclair Lewis

... 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 had ...
— History of the English People, Volume VI (of 8) - Puritan England, 1642-1660; The Revolution, 1660-1683 • John Richard Green

... purpose. Above her hovered the shadow of grim, hidden, secret power. No queen could have given more royally out of a bounteous store than Jane Withersteen gave her people, and likewise to those unfortunates whom her people hated. She asked only the divine right of all women—freedom; to love and to live as her heart willed. And yet prayer ...
— Riders of the Purple Sage • Zane Grey

... overbearing through long continuance in power and had as a consequence raised up many enemies in their own ranks. Their opponents, the Tories, had by this time given up all hope of restoring to the throne the direct Stuart line; but they still cherished their old notions about divine right. With the accession of George III the coveted opportunity came to them to rally around the throne again. George received his Tory friends with open arms, gave them offices, and bought them seats in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... my kiss," the Duchess interrupted, wooingly, "and their King, by divine right and heritage, will rule untrammelled by country clowns, court knaves and foolish lords, who now make up a silly Parliament. With such a King, England will be better with no Parliament to ...
— Mistress Nell - A Merry Tale of a Merry Time • George C. Hazelton, Jr.

... the old servitor; "it but makes assurance doubly sure as to your true identity, for the fact that you have not the ring is positive proof that you are king and that they have sought to hide the fact by removing the insignia of your divine right to rule in Lutha." ...
— The Mad King • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... Stuarts. How came the house of Hanover upon the throne? You see, sir, that if you zealous loyalists could shift off James, we, with less belief in the divine right of kings, can ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce

... weakly—the invitation. Secretly, through his hostile study of the game, he had convinced himself that he by divine right could do perfectly what these people did so clumsily. Again and again his hands had itched for the club as he watched futile drives. He knew he could hit the ball. He couldn't help hitting it, stuck up the way it was on a pinch of sand—stuck up like a sore thumb. ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... this is true 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

... 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, ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... confidence as a matter of course, knowing that his loyalty would always be above suspicion. He had a great capacity for loyalty. There was no taint in it of self-interest, nor of snobbishness. He believed, for instance, in the divine right of kings; and from what he let fall we could see that he had given the most remarkable devotion not only to every cause for which he had fought, but to the individual who represented it. That in time each of these individuals ...
— Captain Macklin • Richard Harding Davis

... world by the 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 ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon

... worth the devotion of men like your uncle and—for instance—Monsieur des Barres? Does not true patriotism lead a man to think of his country's good and glory, not of the advantage of one special family? Your uncle can hardly believe in that mediaeval fiction of divine right, I suppose?" ...
— Angelot - A Story of the First Empire • Eleanor Price

... armed himself in every possible way. He had a passable knowledge of English and an amazing familiarity with the Scriptures. He also possessed a knack of interpreting any phase of it to strengthen the argument from his standpoint. But I, too, could fight for ideals; love of freedom and the divine right of the individual were themes as dear to me as they were hateful to Kishimoto San. It had occurred many times before, and we always argued in a circular process. Neither of us had ever ...
— The House of the Misty Star - A Romance of Youth and Hope and Love in Old Japan • Fannie Caldwell Macaulay

... gentlemen, we are not here today to conclude that God set the white man over the black. We are to conclude simply that He set him apart from the black man. The divine right of slavery was an impiety, and, worst of all, an absurdity. The South made that mistake, and bitter has been the price of her folly. Yet the South, having sinned, paid the price of her sinning in all ways exacted of her. She ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... the fortunes of their worshippers and subjects. In this way the old savage notion of inspiration or possession gradually develops into the doctrine of the divinity of kings, which after a long period of florescence dwindles away into the modest theory that kings reign by divine right, a theory familiar to our ancestors not long ago, and perhaps not wholly obsolete among us even now. However, inspired men need not always blossom out into divine kings; they may, and often do, remain in the chrysalis state of simple deities revered by their simple worshippers, their ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... run it was impossible. The feeling of French nationality, which had already met the victor himself with secret warnings, found its most wonderful expression in the Maid who revived in the French their old attachment to their native King and his divine right; the English, when she fell into their hands, with ungenerous hate inflicted on her the punishment of the Lollards: but the Valois King had already gained a firm footing. It was Charles VII who understood how to appease the enmity of Burgundy, and in unison ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... which were proposed in that Bill; the Natives were not ready for it. The hon. member for Victoria West had said that there was a disposition in certain directions to repress the Natives. He (the speaker) believed that there was a feeling that white men had some divine right to the labour of the black, that the black people were to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, and he wanted to say that while men were obsessed with that feeling they would never be able to legislate fairly. They had no more divine right to the labour of the ...
— Native Life in South Africa, Before and Since • Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje

... is to commemorate the Declaration of Independence, which was based on individual rights. For ages it was a question where the governing power rightfully belonged; patriarch, priest, and monarch each claimed it by divine right. Our country declared it vested in the individual. Not only was this clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence, but the same ground was maintained in the secret proceedings upon framing the constitution. The old confederation was abandoned because ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various

... one more hope of unfortunate France, the head of the Legitimist party, faithful to the last of his "divine right," has ...
— Fair Italy, the Riviera and Monte Carlo • W. Cope Devereux

... property, like royalty, exists by divine right. He traces back its origin to God himself—ab Jove principium. He begins ...
— What is Property? - An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government • P. J. Proudhon

... the Mohammedans, who reject the "SUNNA" (q. v.) and championed the claims of Ali Mahommed's cousin and son-in-law to succeed to the Caliphate, and maintain the divine right of his descendants to represent the prophet in the Mohammedan Church. The ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... Treason, Charles the Martyr, the Restoration and the Accession—gave suitable occasion for sermons of the most polemical vehemence. Even the two Collects for the King at the beginning of the Communion Service were regarded as respectively Tory and Whig. The first, with its bold assertion of the Divine Right of Sovereignty, was that which commended itself to every loyal clergyman on his promotion; and unfavourable conclusions were drawn with regard to the civil sentiments of the man who preferred the colourless alternative. ...
— Collections and Recollections • George William Erskine Russell

... clear gain to humanity that unbelief has sprung up against the divine right of kings, that men no longer believe that the monarch is "God's anointed" or that "the powers that be are ordained of God". In the struggles for political freedom the weight of the Church was mostly thrown ...
— Humanity's Gain from Unbelief - Reprinted from the "North American Review" of March, 1889 • Charles Bradlaugh

... absurd as the doctrine of divine right most undoubtedly is, it is still more astonishing, that when so many human hereditary rights had centered in this king, his son and heir king Charles the first should be told by those infamous judges, who pronounced ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone

... classical ideals at the Renaissance, in the new emphasis upon individual rights born of the Reformation, in the rebellion of the Puritan English and Scotch against the divine right of kings and bishops to rule them against their conscience and will, in the Revolution of 1789 and the Napoleonic wars, the Feudal System passed, and the commercial order took its place. Its cherished virtues are initiative, industry, push, thrift, independence. ...
— Some Christian Convictions - A Practical Restatement in Terms of Present-Day Thinking • Henry Sloane Coffin

... can say what we will about democracy, but when a child is born unto a man that man unconsciously puts on the purple. He becomes the ruler and sits on the throne of authority. He even seeks to cloak his weaknesses and his mistakes in that threadbare old fabrication about the divine right of kings. But I can see that he is often wrong, and even my Dinkie can see that he is not always right in his decrees. More and more often, of late, I've observed the boy studying his father, studying ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... of England was the second king of the Stuart dynasty, whose despotic tendencies made the seventeenth century a memorable period in history. He ascended the throne at the age of twenty-five, and began at once to assert his belief in the divine right of kings. Indignant at the restraints which Parliament set upon his power, he dissolved this ...
— Van Dyck - A Collection Of Fifteen Pictures And A Portrait Of The - Painter With Introduction And Interpretation • Estelle M. Hurll

... 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. They submitted, in the meantime, to the "might" ...
— The Crew of the Water Wagtail • R.M. Ballantyne

... Piang's safe return from his long journey to the haunt of Ganassi, the wonder man. That one so young had accomplished the difficult task proved to the tribe conclusively that Piang was indeed the chosen of Allah, the charm boy by divine right. Kali was glad of the opportunity to plunge his people into gaieties, for a mysterious shadow had hovered over the barrio for a week, and he hoped to dispel the effects of a recent disaster by merriment and fiesta. In the night an infant had disappeared from its ...
— The Adventures of Piang the Moro Jungle Boy - A Book for Young and Old • Florence Partello Stuart

... 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 ...
— The True Woman • Justin D. Fulton

... minds were entirely taken up at all times and on all occasions with such questions as the Abolition of the Slave Trade, the Restoration of the Jews, or the progress of Unitarianism. I myself at one period took a pretty strong turn to inveighing against the doctrine of Divine Right, and am not yet cured of my prejudice on that subject. How many projectors have gone mad in good earnest from incessantly harping on one idea: the discovery of the philosopher's stone, the finding out the longitude, or paying off the national debt! The disorder at length comes to a fatal crisis; ...
— Table-Talk - Essays on Men and Manners • William Hazlitt

... discovered in Moliere a convenient mouthpiece for his dislikes. The selfish king was no lover of the nobility, and was short-sighted enough not to perceive that the author's attacks on the nobles paved the way for doubts on the divine right of kings themselves. Hence he protected Moliere, and entrusted to him the care of writing plays for his entertainments; the public did not, however, see The Bores until the 4th of November of the same year; and then it met ...
— The Bores • Moliere

... witches, without the motives actuating in different ways Catholics and Calvinists, and placed midway between both parties, the reformed English Church was not so much interested in identifying her crimes with sorcerers as in maintaining the less tremendous formulae of Divine right, Apostolical succession, and similar pretensions. Yet if they did not so furiously engage themselves in actual witch-prosecutions, Anglican divines have not been slow in expressly or impliedly affirming the reality of diabolical interposition. Nor can the most favourable ...
— The Superstitions of Witchcraft • Howard Williams

... tavern or a church; for these Whigs are much better pleased that the Bishops should derive their authority from the Parliament than from the Apostles. The Lord Bolingbroke observed that this notion of divine right would only make so many tyrants in lawn sleeves, but that the laws made ...
— Letters on England • Voltaire

... but the "door" was open to "white people only." As to the darkest and weakest of peoples there was but one unanimity in Europe,—that which Hen Demberg of the German Colonial Office called the agreement with England to maintain white "prestige" in Africa,—the doctrine of the divine right of ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois

... thinking, as the Duke of Wellington was said to do, MOST of the shoes of his soldiers; despising all manner of eclat and eloquence; perhaps, like Count Moltke, "silent in seven languages". We have reached a "climate" of opinion where figures rule, where our very supporter of Divine right, as we deemed him, our Count Bismarck, amputates kings right and left, applies the test of results to each, and lets none live who are not to do something. There has in truth been a great change during the last five hundred years in the predominant occupations of the ruling part of mankind; formerly ...
— The English Constitution • Walter Bagehot

... lent no beauty to her face. Rosemary's eyes were grey and lustreless, her hair ashen, and almost without colour. Her features were irregular and her skin dull and lifeless. She had not even the indefinable freshness that is the divine right of youth. Her mouth drooped wistfully at the corners, and even the half-discouraged dimple in her chin looked like a dent ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... be seen from the above that the State government as well as the National is planned on the accepted fact that all power originates with the people. In America the people have the divine right to rule. The people possess all rights which they have not expressly given to the government. The Bill of Rights which we have discussed is therefore a double safeguard which the people have thrown about ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James

... 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 ...
— King John of Jingalo - The Story of a Monarch in Difficulties • Laurence Housman

... recognition of their ancient rights and liberties, secured to them, in the first place, by the Magna Charta,—just at this time looms up the obstruction of a King so imbued with the defunct ideal of the divine right of Kings that he is blind to the tendencies of the age. What wonder, then, if the swirling waters of discontent should rise higher and higher until he became ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke

... "is 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

... rivals and the obvious advantages of a union of the English and Scottish crowns; and he was led to attribute a supernatural virtue to the hereditary principle which had overcome obstacles so tremendous. Hence his theory of divine hereditary right. It must be distinguished from the divine right which the Tudors claimed; that was a right which was not necessarily hereditary, but might be varied by the God of battles, as at Bosworth. It must also be distinguished from the Catholic theory, which gave the church a voice in the election and deposition ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... the Jury: The sanctity of human life is the foundation on which society rests, and its preservation is the supreme aim of all human legislation. Rights of property, of liberty, are merely conditional, subordinated to the superlative divine right of life. Labor creates property, law secures liberty, but God alone gives life; and woe to that tribunal, to those consecrated priests of divine justice, who, sworn to lay aside passion and prejudice, and to array themselves in the immaculate robes of a juror's impartiality, ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson

... The Stuarts: "Divine Right of Kings" supported by majority of gentry and landowners (cavaliers), opposed by the commercial and trading classes and yeomen (roundheads). The Kings strove for absolute power, ...
— Ontario Teachers' Manuals: History • Ontario Ministry of Education

... seeing their precipitancy and rashness in this matter, (as they accounted it) was afterward apologized for; and that it was not the deed of the Assembly. Their not asserting in any explicit and formal act the divine right of Presbytry, and the instrinsick power of the Church, though often desired by many privat Christians, and some several members, their not confirming and ratifying the Acts of the Assemblies that were made in our best times for strengthening and advancing the work of reformation, contrar to the ...
— The Covenants And The Covenanters - Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation • Various

... her views. While the economical Elizabeth spared not her treasures to support the Flemings against Spain, and Henry IV. against the League, James abandoned his daughter, his son-in-law, and his grandchild, to the fury of their enemies. While he exhausted his learning to establish the divine right of kings, he allowed his own dignity to sink into the dust; while he exerted his rhetoric to prove the absolute authority of kings, he reminded the people of theirs; and by a useless profusion, sacrificed the chief of his sovereign ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

... been—oh! detestable. Yet what can you expect? The true—blush for them. A certain person is a disgrace to the church of which he pretends to be a servant. Where does he find in our canons sanction for his proceedings, his undutiful expressions towards one who is his sovereign by divine right, and who can do no wrong? And above all, where does he find authority for inflaming the passions of a vile mob against a nation intended by nature and by position to ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... and justice in the earth. In His days Judah shall be saved, and Israel shall dwell safely, and this is His name whereby He shall be called, The Lord our Righteousness." (That is, the ruler of God's choice—a king, then, in fact, by Divine right.) "Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that they shall no more say, The Lord liveth, which brought up the children of Israel out of the land of Egypt; but, The Lord liveth, which brought up and which led the seed of the House of Israel ...
— The Lost Ten Tribes, and 1882 • Joseph Wild

... 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 crouching ...
— The Convert • Elizabeth Robins

... said, of a righteous war is the self-defense of the prince or of his subjects. This ground also is matter of both natural and divine right; for even as self-defense is a natural right, on which right is founded the rule of vim vi repellere, so too in the prince is the defense of his subjects—for the care which the prince has of his subjects is as essential on his part as is the care which ...
— The Philippine Islands, 1493-1898, Volume VIII (of 55), 1591-1593 • Emma Helen Blair

... were a solution, then the socialist government could not long remain elective. It would have to reign by divine right, like the Jesuits in Paraguay. It would have to be a despotism, not only in its policy but in its origin, in fact a monarchy. No intelligent king has any inducement to choose incompetent men as his officials. ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... enterprise. Those who thought they discerned in his subsequent conduct an insensibility to the distresses of his followers, coupled with that egotistical attention to his own interests which has been often attributed to the Stuart family, and which is the natural effect of the principles of divine right in which they were brought up, were now generally considered as dissatisfied and splenetic persons, who, displeased with the issue of their adventure and finding themselves involved in the ruins of a falling cause, indulged themselves in undeserved reproaches against their ...
— Redgauntlet • Sir Walter Scott

... proposition. Instead of brotherly confession one to another, or the pastoral sympathy of a fatherly elder, the religious mind of the day was instructed in an awful mysterious sacrament of confession, which gave to some human being a divine right to unlock the most secret chambers of the soul, to scrutinize and direct its most veiled and intimate thoughts, and, standing in God's stead, to direct the current of its most sensitive and ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 8, No. 47, September, 1861 • Various

... Conformably with the whole bent of his natural disposition and character, he adhered anxiously to the peaceful course of his work and the pursuit of his intellectual pleasures. Questions involving deep principles, such as those of the Divine right of the Papacy, the absolute character of Church authority, or the freedom of Christian judgment, as founded on the Bible, he regarded from aloof; notwithstanding that silence or concealment towards either party, when once these principles were publicly put in ...
— Life of Luther • Julius Koestlin

... that Caesar, who presumably had the kingdom of heaven within him as much as any disciple, had his place in the scheme of things. Indeed the apostles made this an excuse for carrying subservience to the State to a pitch of idolatry that ended in the theory of the divine right of kings, and provoked men to cut kings' heads off to restore some sense of proportion in the matter. Jesus certainly did not consider the overthrow of the Roman empire or the substitution of a new ecclesiastical organization for the Jewish Church or for the priesthood ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw

... of his belief, and in reality the chief article, Mr. Vane would not mention to you. It was perhaps because he had never formulated the article for himself. It might be called a faith in the divine right of Imperial Railroads to rule, but it was left out of the verbal creed. This is far from implying hypocrisy to Mr. Vane. It was his foundation-rock and too sacred for light conversation. When he allowed himself to be bitter against various "young men with missions" who had sprung up in various ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... you'll have all of them eating out of your hand," Verkan Vall concluded. "You know, this will probably go down in Hulgun history as the Reformation of Ghullam the Holy. I've always wondered whether the theory of the divine right of kings was invented by the kings, to establish their authority over the people, or by the priests, to establish their authority over the kings. It works about as well one way as ...
— Temple Trouble • Henry Beam Piper

... over the gunwale to give the parting boat its course; but that a king will not usually die with, much less for, his passengers,—thinks it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die for him? Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment;—not a man of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer;—not with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... in its wrath, in its struggle for the divine right of Market Street to rule, Harvey fell upon these blithe pilgrims with a sad sincerity that was worthy of a better cause. And the more the young men laughed, the more they played tricks upon the police, reading the Sermon on the Mount to provoke ...
— In the Heart of a Fool • William Allen White

... his way to heaven," leaving him as heir to the throne.* Nofritari assumed the authority; after having shared the royal honours for nearly twenty-five years with her husband, she resolutely refused to resign them.** She was thus the first of those queens by divine right who, scorning the inaction of the harem, took on themselves the right to fulfil the active duties of a sovereign, and claimed the recognition of the equality or superiority of their titles to those of their ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 4 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... 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 of a wasp-like ...
— Langstroth on the Hive and the Honey-Bee - A Bee Keeper's Manual • L. L. Langstroth

... highly educated and efficient officers' mess will rise mechanically and drink to the Monarch, and sit down to go on discussing the New Republic's growth. I do not see, indeed, why an intelligent monarch himself, in these days, should not waive any silliness about Divine Right, and all the ill-bred pretensions that sit so heavily on a gentlemanly King, and come into the movement with these others. When the growing conception touches, as in America it has already touched, the legacy-leaving class, there will be fewer ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells

... "Of royalty—of divine right. We must do nothing to spoil the tradition, or weaken it, or our people may find out that we are not really necessary, after all, just as the Americans ...
— Affairs of State • Burton E. Stevenson

... own iniquity ceases to exist, we must, to establish a new government on a true and just basis, go back to the origin of Civil Authority. No one argues now for the Divine Right of Kings, but in studying the old controversy we get light on the subject of government that is of all time. To the conception that kings held their power immediately from God, "Suarez boldly opposed the thesis of the initial sovereignty of the people; from whose consent, therefore, ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... best is shadowy, indefinite, depending mostly upon traditional custom and audacious assumption backed by armed force. If it fall back upon a certain alleged divine right it cannot produce documents to prove its authority. The industrial monarchs of the United States are fortified with both power and proofs of possession. Those bonds and stocks are the tangible titles to tangible property; whoso holds them is vested with the ownership of the necessities of tens ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... literature, the refuse of intelligent industry, finds a market only with the idlers whom it amuses and the proletaires whom it fascinates, the jugglers who besiege power and the charlatans who shelter themselves behind it, the hierophants of divine right who blow the trumpet of Sinai, and the fanatical proclaimers of the sovereignty of the people, whose few mouth-pieces, compelled to practise their tribunician eloquence from tombs until they can shower it from the height of rostrums, know no better than to give to ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon

... sentiments; but it was impossible for an Irish Protestant, who had any real sympathy with his country, to feel otherwise: it had endured nothing but misery from the monarchical form of government. The Catholics, probably, were only prevented from adopting similar opinions by their inherent belief in the divine right of kings. In 1791 the fears of those who thought the movement had a democratic tendency, were confirmed by the celebration of the anniversary of the French Revolution in Belfast, July, 1791; and in consequence of this, sixty-four Catholics of the upper classes presented a loyal address to ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack

... church, the ruin of the country, the horrors of civil war, and its uncertain event, issuing perhaps in the wider extension and firmer establishment of slavery itself. It was an immense power that the bold, resolute, rule-or-ruin supporters of the divine right of slavery held over the Christian public of the whole country, so long as they could keep these threats suspended in the air. It seemed to hold in the balance against a simple demand to execute righteousness toward a poor, oppressed, and helpless race, immense interests of ...
— A History of American Christianity • Leonard Woolsey Bacon

... this world of much evil, is to thole and suffer with resignation, as lang as it is possible for human nature to do. I do not counsel passive obedience: that is a doctrine that the Church of Scotland can never abide; but the divine right of resistance, which, in the days of her trouble, she so bravely asserted against popish and prelatic usurpations, was never resorted to till the attempt was made to remove the ark of the tabernacle from her. I therefore counsel you, my young ...
— The Annals of the Parish • John Galt

... of that attempt at asserting the Divine Right by the South Harniss king of hearts. Albert was more miserable than ever, angrier than ever—not only at Raymond and Helen, but at himself—and his newly-discovered jealousy burned with a brighter and ...
— The Portygee • Joseph Crosby Lincoln

... you have tampered with last wills, so that that has been given to you, which belonged to other lawful heirs, and you have done it by your parables and false doctrines.[7] Thus what the people have as a civil right, you claim as a divine right.... See, here we find the real forgers of wills, who have foisted in their avarice, by pretending that it was kindly done for the salvation of souls. But they say, if one of his own free-will gives us his property on his death-bed, is it not right for us ...
— The Life and Times of Ulric Zwingli • Johann Hottinger

... had a curiosity to see the face of so eminent an artist buried in that out-of-the-way place. Accordingly I posted myself near the door of the organ loft, to see him as he left the church—a thing I certainly would not have done for a crowned head; but great artists, after all, are they not kings by divine right? ...
— The Deputy of Arcis • Honore de Balzac

... a very wide difference existed between the characters of the two colonies. The cavalier, sparkling and fiery as the wines he quaffed, the defender of established authority and of the divine right of kings, was the antithesis of the abstemious and thoughtful religionist and reformer, dissatisfied with the present, hopeful of a better future, and not forgetful that it was in anger God gave the ...
— The Knight of the Golden Melice - A Historical Romance • John Turvill Adams

... more than a blunt expression of the sense that no third party can relieve a man from the obligations of the position to which he is called by God, and that for the duties of that position the man can confidently expect divine guidance and help. Be that as it may, the divine right of conscience will, among Americans, receive ...
— Lessons of the war with Spain and other articles • Alfred T. Mahan

... exhibiting his brand on Ab Handy to show the town that his title to Handy was still good. For though there was considerable of the King Cole about Hedrick—in that he was a merry old soul—he was always king, and he insisted on having his divine right to rule the politics of the county unquestioned. That was his vanity and he knew it, and was not ashamed ...
— In Our Town • William Allen White

... mythological beauty and charm, of boundless ambition, of resistless energy, of incalculable promise, in outer semblance and in avowed creed the fine flower of aristocratic England, professing the divine right of the House of Lords and the utilitarian sanctity of the Church of England—between Paul, that is to say, and the Radical, progressive councillor of Hickney Heath, the Free Zionist dissenter (not even Congregationalist or Baptist or Wesleyan, or any powerfully organized Non-conformist ...
— The Fortunate Youth • William J. Locke

... "excellent well," in its restricted constitutional form; she has all the 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 a ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood

... contempt, had been doing what it liked from time immemorial. It had enjoyed all the good things of life—great station, great wealth, great power—with a comfortable assurance that they belonged to it by divine right. It had governed England with credit to itself and benefit to the country. As Lord Beaconsfield said, it was only because a Whig Minister wished to curry favour with the populace, that an Earl who had ...
— Matthew Arnold • G. W. E. Russell

... Saxons[1]; the Coming of the Normans V. The Norman Sovereigns[1] VI. The Angevins, or Plantagenets; Rise of the English Nation[1] VII. The Self-Destruction of Feudalism VIII. Absolutism of the Crown; the Reformation; the New Learning[1] IX. The Stuart Period; the Divine Right of Kings versus the Divine Right of the People X. India gained; America lost—Parliamentary Reform—Government by the People A General Summary of English Constitutional History Constitutional Documents Genealogical Descent of the English Sovereigns[2] A Classified List of Books ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery



Words linked to "Divine right" :   school of thought, doctrine, philosophy, ism, divine right of kings, philosophical system



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