ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT--CONTINUED.
II. Rejecting the patriarchal theory as untenable, and shrinking
from asserting the divine origin of government, lest they should
favor theocracy, and place secular society under the control of
the clergy, and thus disfranchise the laity, modern political
writers have sought to render government purely human, and
maintain that its origin is conventional, and that it is founded
in compact or agreement. Their theory originated in the
seventeenth century, and was predominant in the last century and
the first third of the present. It has been, and perhaps is yet,
generally accepted by American politicians and statesmen, at
least so far as they ever trouble their heads with the question
at all, which it must be confessed is not far.
The moral theologians of the Church have generally spoken of
government as a social pact or compact, and explained the
reciprocal rights and obligations of subjects and rulers by the
general law of contracts; but they have never held that
government originates in a voluntary agreement between the people
and their rulers, or between the several individuals composing
the community. They have never held that government has only a
conventional origin or authority. They have simply meant, by the
social compact, the mutual relations and reciprocal rights and
duties of princes and their subjects, as implied in the very
existence and nature of civil society.
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