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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



... 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

... leisure and culture and quiet good-breeding into the face, whether it was in the original or not. In fact, he fused into every picture that he painted a goodly modicum of his own spirit. You can always tell a Van Dyck portrait; there is in the face a self-sufficiency, a something that speaks of "divine right"—not of arrogance, for arrogance and assumption reveal a truth which man is trying to hide, and that is that his position is a new acquirement. Van Dyck's people are all to the ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard

... 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. [5] Of these kindred, though rival, names, the former had given birth ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon

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

... the distinction between the canonical and apocryphal books of the Scriptures. He asserts his divine right, as Bishop of ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 4 • Various

... 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 their sacred ...
— Our Government: Local, State, and National: Idaho Edition • J.A. James

... that America belonged, in fee simple, and by special divine right, to that particular hoard of savages, who, by killing off some other hoard of savages, were in possession when Columbus first saw the Great West, the Eastern States, which had already secured their land by conquest, have become more ...
— Half a Century • Jane Grey Cannon Swisshelm

... 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 enthusiasm, and now denouncing in terms of cutting sarcasm the abuses ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... on, 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

... 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 ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren

... him. His ideas suddenly underwent a change, and his political conscience veered completely round. He hastened to adopt the doctrines of order, and turned to the Church as he might have done to the police authorities, to the Divine right as the supreme power and a providential security for ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... reached by the delegates: "The high contracting powers, being convinced that the system of representative government is equally incompatible with the monarchical principle and the maxim of the sovereignty of the people with the divine right, mutually engage in the most solemn manner to use all their efforts to put an end to the system of representative government in whatever country it may exist in Europe and to prevent its being introduced in ...
— History of the United States • Charles A. Beard and Mary R. Beard

... be attained. Political machinery, in which the modern world had come to put so much faith, is only another delusion of a mechanical age. The burden of history is for him always the need of the Able Man. "I say, Find me the true Koenning, King, Able Man, and he has a divine right over me." Carlyle thus throws down the gauntlet at once to the scientific and to the democratic movements of his time. His pronounced antagonism to the modern spirit in these two most important manifestations must be kept steadily in mind ...
— Sartor Resartus, and On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History • Thomas Carlyle

... to submit to the laws of the land he differs from his grandmother Queen Victoria, and from his ally, Emperor Francis-Joseph, the tenure of whose thrones was originally based on what in olden times was known as the Divine right of kings. Thus, in England, as in Austria, and even in Spain and Portugal, the mediaeval theory still prevails that "the king can do no wrong!" Queen Victoria, for instance, is not below the law like ...
— The Secret Memoirs of the Courts of Europe: William II, Germany; Francis Joseph, Austria-Hungary, Volume I. (of 2) • Mme. La Marquise de Fontenoy

... 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 ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow

... 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 a sympathy ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... America," has been related of 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

... how should she ever even think to yield? It was unthinkable. He, the man, the weak, the false, the treacherous, the half-hearted, it was he who must yield. Was not hers the divine will and the divine right? Ha, she would be less than woman if she ever capitulated, abandoned her divine responsibility as woman! ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence

... least of duty slight, Because the least command, of divine right, Requires that I myself subject thereto; Willful resisters do themselves undo. But let's keep order, let the first be first; Repent, believe, and love; and then I trust I have that right, which is divine, to all That is enjoined; be they great or small. Only ...
— The Works of John Bunyan • John Bunyan

... thing myself," he had said. "My glorious ancestors would never have consented to allow these upstart Republicans to lead in a warlike enterprise of this kind. What would my grandfather have said to it? I suspect that it is some scheme aimed at the divine right of kings." ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss

... thoughts that they create new epochs in history. Through Luther the thought of liberty in church and state set tyrants trembling and thrones tottering. Through Cromwell the thought of personal rights became a weapon powerful enough utterly to destroy that citadel of iniquity named the divine right of kings. It was a great moral thought called the "Golden Rule" that shotted the cannon of the North for victory and spiked the cannon of the South for defeat. Measureless is the might of a moral idea. It exceeds the force of earthquakes and the ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... deny. Is not the proper question for you to discuss, then, not whether the Papacy be or be not compatible with republican government, but whether it be or be not founded in Divine right? If the Papacy be founded in Divine right, it is supreme over whatever is founded only in human right, and then your institutions should be made to harmonize with it: not it with your institutions!!! The real question, then, is not the compatibility or the incompatibility of the Catholic ...
— Americanism Contrasted with Foreignism, Romanism, and Bogus Democracy in the Light of Reason, History, and Scripture; • William Gannaway Brownlow

... never been careless of the true succession of faith and doctrine and practice from the time of the Apostles to the present day, a succession to which she lays a not unworthy claim; and, claiming loyalty to Apostolic doctrine, polity and practice, she has ever been jealous in asserting her Divine right, as an Apostolic Church, to the controlling presence and guiding wisdom of the Holy Spirit of God. Under the guidance of that Spirit she has ever claimed, and still claims, the right of administering the government and directing the worship which, in their essential principles, are set ...
— Presbyterian Worship - Its Spirit, Method and History • Robert Johnston

... Frances to approach. I touched my cousin's arm, gently thrusting her forward, and the next moment she was courtesying to the floor before the man who believed, in common with most of his subjects, that he owned by divine right the body and soul of every man in England, together with every man's ox and his ass, his wife and his daughter, and all that ...
— The Touchstone of Fortune • Charles Major

... anticipate the Revolution to which he, more than any man, had contributed. Walpole, with stronger personal reasons than Voltaire for disliking a catastrophe, was as furious as Burke when the volcano burst forth. He was a republican so far as he disbelieved in the divine right of kings, and hated enthusiasm and loyalty generally. He wished the form to survive and the spirit to disappear. Things were rotten, and he wished them to stay rotten. The ideal to which he is constantly ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen

... is frequently seen here driven double or single by means of a small rope line attached to a tall, emaciated gentleman, who is generally clothed with the divine right of suffrage, to which he adds a small pair ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye

... 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 him with an impersonal and critical eye. And this habit of silent ...
— The Prairie Child • Arthur Stringer

... that haughty lack of manners which bespoke the aristocrat. I waxed very eloquent when, as I say, I got my mind really going. I spoke of kings and queens and their uses in no uncertain phrases, of divine right, of dukes, earls, marquises—of all the pompous establishments of British royalty and nobility—with that contemptuously humorous tolerance of a necessary and somewhat amusing evil which we find in American comic papers. We had a battle royal for ...
— Ghosts I have Met and Some Others • John Kendrick Bangs

... at 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; ...
— Great Fortunes from Railroads • Gustavus Myers

... make in regard to all other human institutions, viewing them historically with reference to their constant service to mankind and their particular adaptation to a changing social state; if, as was the case with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, the Church proclaims a commission not subject to human control, by virtue of which it would impose creed and ritual, and assumes those great offices, reserved in Puritan thought to God only,—then does ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry

... sir, serve the 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 shift ...
— Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911: Love in '76 - An Incident of the Revolution • Oliver Bell Bunce

... "Soldiers of the Lord." With few exceptions, they remained steadfast in their uncompromising non- conformity, abhorring Prelacy and Popery, and entertaining no very orthodox notions with respect to the divine right of Kings. From them the Quakers drew their most zealous champions; men who, in renouncing the "carnal weapons" of their old service, found employment for habitual combativeness in hot and wordy sectarian warfare. To this day the vocabulary ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier

... drawing within its circle vaster territories, the world saw absolute rule established in England, France, Spain, and Germany. Previous to the sixteenth century, the word 'absolutism' was unknown in Christendom, as was the doctrine of the "divine right of kings" understood and preached as it has since been ...
— Irish Race in the Past and the Present • Aug. J. Thebaud

... been ill-used enough by the English; it would be still worse, he said, if they were invested with legislative rights. "On the contrary, it is the Boer nation which is entitled to supremacy, not only in the Transvaal but right to the sea. The Cape Colonies," he continued, "are ours by divine right, and so is Natal, and no Afrikaner may rest until we are reinstated." General approbation and stamping of feet followed that passionately rendered speech. Not a word of restraint or censure from any ...
— Origin of the Anglo-Boer War Revealed (2nd ed.) - The Conspiracy of the 19th Century Unmasked • C. H. Thomas

... as a concession to the indecent perceptions of the whites (whom for the most part he despised); though he preferred to be otherwise, for he was a fine figure—not a plaster saint by any means, but a hero in his way and well set up, and an artist by Divine Right. ...
— My Tropic Isle • E J Banfield

... above, 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

... perhaps regard the piece as more or less contemporary with Cowley's juvenile effort. There is, it is true, one passage,[336] treating of tyrants and revolutions, which is such as a moderate supporter of 'divine right' might have been expected to pen in the later days of the civil war; the publisher's words, however, are unequivocal, and can hardly refer to a ...
— Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama - A Literary Inquiry, with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration - Stage in England • Walter W. Greg

... supernatural power was not contested, but it was now ingeniously turned against the sovereign. The King's authority was invoked against himself in the person of the Prince of Orange, to whom, thirteen years before, a portion of that divine right had been delegated. The estates of Holland met at Dort on the 15th July, as representatives of the people; but they were summoned by Orange, royally commissioned in 1559 as stadholder, and therefore the supreme legislative and executive officer ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley

... Palace, in which we find the two following theses proved: 1. "Constraint, in the sense of employing violence to enforce ecclesiastical laws, originated with the state." 2. "The constraint of ecclesiastical laws is by divine right exclusively moral constraint."[4] ...
— The Inquisition - A Critical and Historical Study of the Coercive Power of the Church • E. Vacandard

... rattle of impersonalities, laughing at Cannon's amazing mustache and Gargantuan furniture, enthusing wildly over Caruso's once-in-a-century voice, throwing satire at Mrs. Cooper Jekyll's confirmed belief in her divine right to queen it, and saying things that made Alice chuckle about the d'Oylys—that apparently ill-matched pair. She drank a glass of champagne with the air of a connoisseur and finally, having displayed ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton

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

... can discover without coming across this manuscript, all my gold, all my silver, all my pearls, my family treasures, the possessions of my fathers, of myself, and of my heirs; the fortune of which I am lord and master by human and divine right, as the bird is of its feathers, or the child of the teeth he cuts with suffering, or as every mortal is of the bad humors, cancerous or leprous, which he may inherit from ...
— Stories by Foreign Authors: Spanish • Various

... over the greater part of France, and with his capital barred against him, it yet gradually became clear to the more far-seeing even of the Catholic party that he was the only center of order and legitimate authority round which France could reorganize itself. While preachers who held the divine right of kings made the churches of Paris ring with declamations in favor of democracy rather than submit to the heretic dog of a Bearnois—much as our soi-disant Democrats have lately been preaching the divine right of slavery, and denouncing the heresies of the Declaration of Independence—Henry ...
— Our American Holidays: Lincoln's Birthday • Various

... so cheerless a place, and the next time he saw M. de Bellegarde he attempted to call his attention to some of the brilliant features of the time. The marquis presently replied that he had but a single political conviction, which was enough for him: he believed in the divine right of Henry of Bourbon, Fifth of his name, to the throne of France. Newman stared, and after this he ceased to talk politics with M. de Bellegarde. He was not horrified nor scandalized, he was not even amused; he felt as he should have felt if he had discovered in M. de Bellegarde ...
— The American • Henry James

... question! I thought you pretended to know something about women? I claim the divine right of whim. Voila, tout! One can't spend the evening in explanation. The spirit moves me to romp. It's infinitely more wholesome than mooning under the stars. All we want now is a cheery vis-a-vis. Ah . . . there's Michel. The ...
— The Great Amulet • Maud Diver

... Lutheran, his fraternal intercourse and intimate fellowship with the Reformed, Episcopalians, Methodists, and other denominations, was of a nature incompatible with true Lutheranism. He evidently regarded the various Christian communions as sister churches, who had practically the same divine right to exist and to propagate their distinctive views as the Lutheran Church. Such was the principle of indifferentism on which Muhlenberg based his practise of fraternal recognition and fellowship. The ...
— American Lutheranism - Volume 1: Early History of American Lutheranism and The Tennessee Synod • Friedrich Bente

... 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; Character and Designs of Wentworth Character of Laud Star Chamber and ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Complete Contents of the Five Volumes • Thomas Babington Macaulay

... filled your mind with a consciousness of your divine right to health and happiness, and the thought of sickness and ...
— A Woman of the World - Her Counsel to Other People's Sons and Daughters • Ella Wheeler Wilcox

... laws of order; the other dynamical, containing the laws of progress. While men's minds were in the theological state, political events, for example, were explained by the will of the gods, and political authority based on divine right. In the metaphysical state of mind, then, to retain our instance, political authority was based on the sovereignty of the people, and social facts were explained by the figment of a falling away from a state of nature. ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 10: Auguste Comte • John Morley

... a brutal war? Our race is by far the most destructive, the most hurtful, and the most formidable, of all the species of the planet. It has even invented for its own use the right of the strongest—a divine right which quiets its conscience in the face of the conquered and the oppressed; we have outlawed all that lives except ourselves. Revolting and manifest abuse; notorious and contemptible breach of the law of justice! The ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... times the chief method of justifying the use of violence and thereby infringing the law of love was by claiming a divine right for the rulers: the Tsars, Sultans, Rajahs, Shahs, and other heads of states. But the longer humanity lived the weaker grew the belief in this peculiar, God—given right of the ruler. That belief withered in the same way and almost simultaneously in the Christian and the Brahman ...
— A Letter to a Hindu • Leo Tolstoy

... the city, and demands of us our money or our life, may we not justly slay Alexander Nicolaiovitch, who comes to our homes in the person of his tax-gatherers to take the bread out of our children's mouths and to help himself to whatever he chooses by the divine right of his Romanoff heirship? I tell you, Herr Max, we may blamelessly lie in wait for him wherever we find him, and whoso says us nay is siding with the wolf against the lambs, with the robber and the slayer against the honest representative ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen

... brought back with them copies of Aristotle and other great Greek philosophers whose authority was still reverenced at Byzantium and Bagdad when London and Paris knew nothing of them. Out of the denial of one set of schoolmen that a divine right to rule, greater than that derived from the people, could exist in kings, grew the political controversy which preceded the English revolution against the Stuarts. Our revolution grew out of the English as the French ...
— The World's Best Orations, Vol. 1 (of 10) • Various

... fitness. I suppose it is a part of your endowment that you can distinguish the capacities and tendencies of health as well as illness; and there's one thing certain, the world cannot afford to do without the workmen who are masters of their business by divine right." ...
— A Country Doctor and Selected Stories and Sketches • Sarah Orne Jewett

... beside her, and settled down upon the largest bowlder of them all in the exact center of that side of the amphitheater which is reserved for the dominant race. Here she squatted, a most repulsive and uninteresting queen; though doubtless quite as well assured of her beauty and divine right to rule as the proudest ...
— At the Earth's Core • Edgar Rice Burroughs

... doctrine would seem to impugn the legality of the whole series of transactions which placed William and Mary on the throne. The admission of an indefeasible right of the heir-apparent would have borne a perilous resemblance to a recognition of that divine right, every pretension to which the Revolution of 1688 had extinguished. If, again, as Fox and his followers at one time endeavored to argue, the Houses in 1789 had no right to the name or power of a Parliament, because the King had no part in ...
— The Constitutional History of England From 1760 to 1860 • Charles Duke Yonge

... and so the appointment was confirmed, and Milton, no new hand at a pamphlet, set to work. In March, 1651, his first Defence of the English People was in print. In this great pamphlet Milton asserts, as against the doctrine of the divine right of kings, the undisputed sovereignty of the people; and he maintains the proposition that, as well by the law of God, as by the law of nations, and the law of England, a king of England may be brought to trial and death, the people being discharged ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell

... old days of France the fair, when no one dared question the divine right of the sovereign, or the purity of the church,—when the rights of the feudal seigneurs were unchallenged, and they could head or hang, mutilate or quarter their vassals at their pleasure,—when freedom was a word as unmeaning as it is now tinder his sacred majesty, Napoleon the Third, there came ...
— The Sea-Witch - or, The African Quadroon A Story of the Slave Coast • Maturin Murray

... of man from ecclesiastical tyranny made eventually for political liberty, its whole tendency in England for the time being was in favour of absolute monarchy. Its first outcome here was to set up a secular monarchy, supreme in Church and State, founded on the theory of the divine right of kings, based on an aristocracy made loyal by the instinct ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones

... 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 entangled among our rocks, and this part of ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli

... cause thereof lies clearly before us. The antagonism between the dynasty of the Stuarts, who came from a foreign land and relied upon their divine right, and the English national conceptions of right, and also the religious wars with royalty in England and Scotland, seem to have sufficiently favored the spreading of doctrines which were able to arouse an energetic opposition. Yet similar conditions existed in many a Continental ...
— The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens • Georg Jellinek

... descriptions as that in Homer of the chamber of Paris and the house of Alcinous furnish forth a picture of that early period—the tyrants' age, the age of the acropoleis, the period of great dynasties with claims to "divine right"' and in many instances at least with all the culture of their time. The vast buildings make us sigh at the thought of wasted human labour, though there is a public usefulness too in some of these designs, such as the draining of the Copaic ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater

... 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 being ever ...
— The Crown of Wild Olive • John Ruskin

... for Maria Theresa had renounced all her rights to the throne; this renunciation had been confirmed by the will of her father Philip IV., sanctioned by the Cortes of Spain, and solemnly ratified by her husband, Louis XIV. Such is "legitimacy—the divine right of kings." All the great powers of Europe, excepting the emperor, promptly acknowledged the ...
— The Empire of Austria; Its Rise and Present Power • John S. C. Abbott

... rather 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. How did they miss it time after ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson

... last falling into perfect harmony with his doctrine. Rousseau had taught him that the people ought to be sovereign, and now the people were being recognised as sovereign de facto no less than de jure. Any limitations on the new divine right united the horror of blasphemy to the secular wickedness of political treason. After the Assembly had come to Paris, a famishing mob in a moment of mad fury murdered an unfortunate baker, who was suspected of keeping back bread. These paroxysms led ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 1 of 3) - Essay 1: Robespierre • John Morley

... on the side of war. So far as these ideas are simple and clear, and especially if they can be conveyed in the form of the phrase, their influence cannot wholly be ignored. Some we have already referred to. The doctrine that might makes right, the conception of state as supreme, the belief in the divine right of kings, the belief in the ordained rights of aristocracy, belief in militarism as a social institution, the doctrine that life may be controlled by reason, all intellectual pessimism, skepticism, any form of concept-worship, whether Hegelian or other, acceptance of the methods of ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge

... the kindly light 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

... was scarcely a nation that acknowledged the right of the individual to a part in government, or to personal freedom. Men were in vassalage to their immediate lord, who, in turn, was obliged to acknowledge the "divine right" of the king over him. With the exception of Switzerland, who for centuries had maintained her freedom, and of England, who had secured the rights of man only by much bloodshed, there was scarcely a people ...
— History of Education • Levi Seeley

... for 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.

... and that he should be so boldly called upon to consider a plea for national freedom and a constitutional rule, as the chief guarantee of tranquillity and honour, is still more remarkable. Certainly it was not from Buchanan that he got those high pretensions of divine right, which had never flourished in Scotland; although by a not uncommon paradox the most faithful partisans of the family which was brought to ruin by these pretensions were found in the northern kingdom. Very different ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant

... of the statue to its founder by the S.I.D.R.I. (Society for Insisting on the Divine Right of Iconoclasts) it is understood that several conversions were effected through the conduct of a band of youthful enthusiasts who, faithful to their principles and unable to restrain their zeal for the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, June 3, 1914 • Various

... Loughlinter. And then declared himself willing to take the sinning woman back to his bosom. "That she had sinned is certain," he said; "I do not believe she has sinned as some sin; but, whatever be her sin, it is for a man to forgive as he hopes for forgiveness." He expatiated on the absolute and almost divine right which it was intended that a husband should exercise over his wife, and quoted both the Old and New Testament in proof of his assertions. And then he went on to say that he appealed to public sympathy, through ...
— Phineas Redux • Anthony Trollope

... and the race that covets most and by power gets most, that race shall survive!" And here is the central knot of the whole dark tangle. The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It is conscious Darwinism—the survival of the fittest, materially, which he is applying to the world—Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will. And the non-Germanic world—the Latin world, for it is a Latin world in varying degrees of saturation ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick

... very interesting to reflect that just this free state of things existed thousands of years ago among our own ancestors in Europe. At that time there were no kings claiming a "divine right" to govern their fellow men. The chiefs were those whose courage, strength, and skill in war made them to be chosen "rulers of men," to use old Homer's phrase. If their sons did not possess these qualities, they remained among the common herd. But there came a time when, here and ...
— French Pathfinders in North America • William Henry Johnson

... the voice of the majority is the voice of God; that it is a folly, if not a crime, to resist any widespread phase of belief or of passion; that any body of persons claiming to be united by a sense of nationality possesses an inherent and divine right to be treated as an independent community. Many of these notions are radically inconsistent with one another. The dogma, for example, of the supremacy of the majority, or the conviction that legislation ought to aim at the greatest happiness of the greatest ...
— England's Case Against Home Rule • Albert Venn Dicey

... simplicity of greatness. She looked the world fearlessly in the eyes. At last, the confusion of her ideas, like frightened birds, re-settling, adjusted itself, and she emerged from the trouble calm, serene, entering into her divine right, like a queen into the rule of ...
— The Octopus • Frank Norris

... depressing 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 ...
— The Belief in Immortality and the Worship of the Dead, Volume I (of 3) • Sir James George Frazer

... secondary. They have a right to the knowledge of their faith; to the training of their conscience by the knowledge of God's commandments; to the Sacraments of grace; and to a moral formation, founded on the precepts and example of our Divine Saviour. These four things belong, by a Divine right, to the child of the poorest working man; by a right more sacred than that which guards the inheritance of lands and titles to the child of the rich. A child of God, and an heir to the kingdom of heaven, holds these ...
— Public School Education • Michael Mueller

... unfitness of his 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 ...
— The History of England - A Study in Political Evolution • A. F. Pollard

... 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, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... be nothing, mere sound and glitter, but back of him was the greatest army that ever trod the planet, taught for half a century to believe in the divine right of kings, and assured now that might and right ...
— The Forest of Swords - A Story of Paris and the Marne • Joseph A. Altsheler

... of kings has gone. It holds no more. We hear now and then, it is true, some silly statement in regard to it, but little attention is paid to it. The divine right of priests has gone except in the minds of the few remaining ignorant and herdable ones. The divine right of dynasties—or rather of dynasties to persist—seems to die a little harder, but it is well on the way. We are now realising ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine

... knowledge, as their great CREATOR, who does nothing in vain, has given them understandings and a desire to know; but besides this they have a right, an indisputable, unalienable, indefeasible, divine right, to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. Rulers are no more than attornies, agents, and trustees for the people: and if the cause, the interest, ...
— A Collection of State-Papers, Relative to the First Acknowledgment of the Sovereignty of the United States of America • John Adams

... do this, and how to do it, we might hope for some amendment. But look at the actual state of things. The religious world is but a portion of the whole—a world within a world. Preachers of peace—men who arrogate to themselves the divine right of inculcating truth, and who, if any, should be free from the corruption that taints the social atmosphere,—such men come before mankind already sick with warfare, widening the breaches, subdividing our divisions. Are these men pure and single-minded? Are these men free from the grasping itch ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 54, No. 337, November, 1843 • Various

... to accomplish this purpose. The principle of Feudalism was one of the earliest attempts to produce the cohesion of the nation; and, in an elementary condition of society, it was partly successful. The theories of 'Divine Right' and 'Social Contract' were other methods which have been adopted; and the unity of the Christian Church has been the great means of producing the cohesion of the State in olden times; and its aid may be again ...
— The Romance of Mathematics • P. Hampson

... religious Freedom must go hand in hand; and Persecution matures them both. A people content with the thoughts made for them by the priests of a church will be content with Royalty by Divine Right,—the Church and the Throne mutually sustaining each other. They will smother schism and reap infidelity and indifference; and while the battle for freedom goes on around them, they will only sink ...
— Morals and Dogma of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry • Albert Pike

... of acquiring supreme Power. That government has most divine right that is best adapted to the public good: a divine right of succession to ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... or their successors to James II. We may freely allow that in these cases, and in many similar ones, there existed on ethical grounds a right, or more strictly a communal duty, to rebel. Few would now proclaim with Filmer the divine right of any government to exact obedience quite irrespective of the wishes or the interests of its subjects. Still fewer would agree with Hobbes that an original contract precludes for ever all opposition to sovereign ...
— Freedom In Service - Six Essays on Matters Concerning Britain's Safety and Good Government • Fossey John Cobb Hearnshaw

... inconsiderate of those who have exalted him. Serves the foolish ones right, I suppose is the proper verdict. But one is not indignant at the worship of their emperor by the Japanese: he is a real ruler, has power, and stands firmly upon divine right. The Japanese are yet children politically; but the English should be out of ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie

... But the particular value of this book at the moment is its reminder that twice already has the House of Hohenzollern humbly pledged its All-Highest word to give constitutional government, only to resume "divine right" at the earliest convenient moment. Ruling Germany, and as much else as possible, with a view to the glorification of one's personal family and one's personal God, must be an exhausting labour, and once again the head of the dynasty is afforded an opportunity for a respite. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 8, 1919 • Various

... of our history; and particularly of the various claims and privileges—and changes—of the monarchical branch of the Constitution. Some of these ceremonies, as we have seen, had their origin in those remote periods in which every believer in Revelation must accord "a divine right" to the kings of Judea; others are connected with the ancient hero-worship of our Pagan ancestors; while a third class perpetuate certain feudal rights and customs, of which they form the only distinct remaining traces. Some, again, are memorials of the triumph of our princes ...
— Coronation Anecdotes • Giles Gossip

... nothing, but I can think what I please, you know, Mr. Helstone, both about France and England; and about revolutions, and regicides, and restorations in general; and about the divine right of kings, which you often stickle for in your sermons, and the duty of non-resistance, and the sanity ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte

... prejudice are past. The prestige of divine right has vanished from France with the old institutions. A new era has commenced. Henceforth the people are called to the free development of their faculties. But in this general impulse, impressed by modern civilization, what can regulate the movement? What government will be sufficiently strong to ...
— Hortense, Makers of History Series • John S. C. Abbott

... succeeded so well for a time: in the long 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 ...
— A History of England Principally in the Seventeenth Century, Volume I (of 6) • Leopold von Ranke

... of whom had wrought for their daily bread and eaten it in the sweat of their brows, to receive their recognition as the representatives of a power which had taken its place among the nations, not by virtue of the divine right of kings, but in the name of the inalienable rights of the people. Happy would it have been for the young King who sat in Louis's seat, if he could have understood the full meaning of his act, and recognized at the same moment the claims of his own people to participate in that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various

... angel was made to extend his arm to the king, as if in the act of offering him the crown. This was a symbol representing the idea often inculcated in those days, that the right of the king to reign was a divine right, as if the crown were placed upon his head ...
— Richard II - Makers of History • Jacob Abbott

... advocate of divine right and absolute power, Hobbes of Malmesbury, was lodging in Fetter Lane when he published his "Leviathan." He was not there, however, in 1660, at the Restoration, since we are told that on that glorious occasion he was standing at the ...
— Old and New London - Volume I • Walter Thornbury

... a 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

... establishment four miles 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 Anti-Slavery Examiner, Omnibus • American Anti-Slavery Society

... as a religious war? There can be wars in the interest of different theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms uplifted on the battle-field for encouragement. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 56, June, 1862 • Various

... think, by the grace of Saban (unto whom, and not unto me, be the glory and thanksgiving. Amen: Selah), I was a good atheist and a good republican; but in the company of this magnificent old rebel, a lifelong incarnation of the divine right of insurrection, I felt myself, by comparison, a Theist and ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd

... this, something happened that engrossed the attention of the younger members of the family. There had been a disturbance in Paris; the old Bonaparte faction coming to the fore, and Louis Philippe had fled from the throne to England. Napoleon Bonaparte had shattered the divine right of kings nearly ...
— A Little Girl of Long Ago • Amanda Millie Douglas

... man—a man who usually represented the ruler or chief of the people, and who, as he was the source of all power and wisdom, was supposed by the ignorant masses to be an incarnation of the sun. Thus arose the spiritual power of monarchs, or the "divine right of kings." ...
— The God-Idea of the Ancients - or Sex in Religion • Eliza Burt Gamble

... with General Miles we agreed to go to a place outside of Arizona and learn to live as the white people do. I think that my people are now capable of living in accordance with the laws of the United States, and we would, of course, like to have the liberty to return to that land which is ours by divine right. We are reduced in numbers, and having learned how to cultivate the soil would not require so much ground as was formerly necessary. We do not ask all of the land which the Almighty gave us in the beginning, but that we may ...
— Geronimo's Story of His Life • Geronimo

... house of large possessions and much influence in the distant North of Scotland; his people were suspicious of the Stuarts because the kings of that ill-fated line were intoxicated with the idea of divine right, and were ever clutching at absolute power; nor had the MacKays any overwhelming and reverential love for bishops, because they considered them to be the instruments of royal tyranny and the oppressors of the kirk. MacKay has found a place between Collier and Venner, and as he sits leaning back ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren

... a mechanism, without expression and without beauty; lest the God who made us should be like us only in this, that he too was selfish and mean and proud; lest his ideas should resemble those that inhabit the brain of a retired money-maker, or of an arbitrary monarch claiming a divine right — instead of towering as the heavens over the earth, above the loftiest moods of highest poet, most generous child, or most devoted mother. I do not mean that these thoughts took these shapes in Harry's mind; but that his feelings were such as might have ...
— David Elginbrod • George MacDonald

... he was a hearty, two-fisted fellow. ... The only fault I ever had to find with him was that he took defeat too hard. He had a sort of "divine right" idea, but he was a bully fighter. I went to his funeral and have joined in mass meetings in his memory, which I suppose is all I can do. ... Of course ... he said a lot of things that were unjust ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane

... time the exhibition of, so to say, the 'works' of poet and novelist is profitable. But a time will come when, with its curiosity sated, the public will turn upon the poet, and throw into his face, on his own authority, that he is but as they are, that his airs of inspiration and divine right are humbug. And in that day the poet will block his silk hat, will shave away the silken moustache, will get him a bottle of Mrs. Allen's Hair Restorer, and betake himself to the sombrero of his ancestors—but it will be all too late. The cat will have been irrecoverably let out of the bag, the ...
— Prose Fancies • Richard Le Gallienne

... la Concepcion, [1] who wrote in the eighteenth century, bases the Spaniards' right to conquest solely on the religious theory. He affirms that the Spanish kings inherited a divine right to these Islands, their dominion being directly prophesied in Isaiah xviii. He assures us that this title from Heaven was confirmed by apostolic authority, [2] and by "the many manifest miracles with ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman

... age of materialism like our own the phenomenon of spiritual power is as significant and inspiring as it is rare. No longer associated with the "divine right" of kings, it has survived the downfall of feudal and theocratic systems as a mystic personal emanation in place of ...
— The Forged Coupon and Other Stories • Leo Tolstoy

... then, in the feudal countries which is the surest bulwark of the "divine right of kings"—and courtiers! A pleasantly distended belly, a mellow thrill from cheap wine, a certainty about the repetition of regular meals and drinks, with enough clothes and shelter to maintain relative positions with the neighbors—this ...
— The Ghost Breaker - A Novel Based Upon the Play • Charles Goddard

... its downfall was Lord Glencardine's change of front," he answered. "In 1638 he became a stalwart supporter of Episcopacy and Divine Right, a course which proved equally fatal to himself and to his ancient Castle of Glencardine. Reid, in his Annals of Auchterarder, relates how, after the Civil War, Lord Dundrennan, in company with his cousin, George Lochan of Ochiltree, ...
— The House of Whispers • William Le Queux

... utterance, but, true to his word, he remained silent. His whole nature was merged into an imperious demand for her, the cry of the man's soul for the woman who belonged to him by divine right. ...
— Master of the Vineyard • Myrtle Reed

... 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. His interest would lead him to do exactly the ...
— The Cult of Incompetence • Emile Faguet

... popular scorn. He called the idea envy, but it was not envy. It was the idea working in the world, and the weight of the scorn was beginning to crumple his soul; for this idea that the people were thinking was finding its way into newspapers, magazines, and books. They were beginning to question the divine right of wealth to rule, because it was wealth—an idea that Barclay could not comprehend even vaguely. The term honest wealth, which was creeping into respectable periodicals, was exceedingly annoying to him. For the very presence of the term seemed to indicate ...
— A Certain Rich Man • William Allen White

... divine right of my own deep love—of heart which cries out to heart. Do you think there is no magnetic power in true love which can divine the answering love in another? Lesbia, call me an insolent coxcomb if you like, but I know you love me, and that you and I may be utterly happy ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon

... disguise, a new opposite Commandment, Thou shalt steal, is everywhere promulgated,—it perhaps behooved, in this universal dotage and deliration, the sound portion of mankind to bestir themselves and rally. When the widest and wildest violations of that divine right of Property, the only divine right now extant or conceivable, are sanctioned and recommended by a vicious Press, and the world has lived to hear it asserted that we have no Property in our very Bodies, but only an accidental Possession and Life-rent, what is the issue to ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle

... can quote Scripture for his purpose,' Reuben! and I think he is prompting you now! What! do you, a mortal, take upon yourself the divine right of punishing sin by death? Reuben, when from the dust of the earth you can make a man, and breathe into his nostrils the breath of life, then perhaps you may talk of punishing sin with death. You cannot even make the smallest gnat or ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth

... with a tumult in her voice and manner, and a kind of choking sob. She showed, now that she stood upright, the slim and elegant shape which is the divine right of American girlhood, clothed with the stylishness that instinctive taste may evoke, even in a hill town, from study of paper patterns, Harper's Bazar, and the costume of summer boarders. Her dress was carried with spirit ...
— The Lady of the Aroostook • W. D. Howells

... violated all law and order, and made way either for the ravages of a barbarous nobility, or for the more intolerable insolence of seditious preachers. In his own person, therefore, he thought all legal power to be centred, by an hereditary and a divine right: and this opinion might have proved dangerous, if not fatal to liberty, had not the firmness of the persuasion, and its seeming evidence, induced him to trust solely to his right, without making the smallest provision, either of force or politics, ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.I., Part D. - From Elizabeth to James I. • David Hume

... 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 accepted the ruling of the North, and, ...
— The Law of the Land • Emerson Hough

... of James I. was that kings governed by divine right, that they received from the Deity a title of which no one could lawfully deprive them, no matter how outrageously they ruled, and that they were not in any way responsible to Parliament or to the people. In acting on this belief, he first trampled on the religious liberty ...
— Halleck's New English Literature • Reuben P. Halleck

... SYLLABUS. Not only was it asserted that the papacy has a divine right to participate in the government of all countries, coordinately with their temporal authorities, but that the supremacy of Rome in this matter must be recognized; and that in any question between them the temporal authority must conform ...
— History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science • John William Draper

... the other hand, the Anglo-Saxon when he came to America left behind him, so far as he himself was concerned, feudalism and all things pertaining to caste, including what was then known in England, and is still known in Germany, as Divine Right. When he at last enunciated his political faith he put in the forefront of his declaration as "self-evident truths," the principles "that all men are created equal;" that they are endowed with "certain inalienable rights," among them "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;" ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams

... through evil and good report, have withstood the wiles of secession. South Carolina has been sown broadcast for the last thirty years with every conceivable form of literature which taught her children the divine right of State sovereignty, carrying with it all its accompanying evils. The sovereign State of South Carolina in her imperial majesty looked down upon the republic itself, and only through a grand condescension, remained to supervise and balance the power which, when ...
— Report on the Condition of the South • Carl Schurz

... beneficial to society. But the real design in the Iliad was directly the reverse. Its obvious tendency was to inflame the minds of young readers with an enthusiastic ardor for military fame; to inculcate the pernicious doctrine of the divine right of kings; to teach both prince and people that military plunder was the most honorable mode of acquiring property; and that conquest, violence and war were the best employment of nations, the most glorious prerogative of bodily strength and ...
— The Columbiad • Joel Barlow

... thousands of the devotees, who addressed Drake with shouts of Hyoh! and invested him with a headdress of rare plumage and a necklace of quaint beads. It was, in fact, a native coronation without a soul to doubt the divine right of their new king. Drake's Protestant scruples were quieted by thinking 'to what good end God had brought this to pass, and what honour and profit it might bring to our country in time to come. So, in the name and to the use of her most excellent Majesty, he took the sceptre, crown, ...
— Elizabethan Sea Dogs • William Wood

... institutions is described in Taswell-Langmead, English Constitutional History, Chaps. 13-14; Smith, History of the English Parliament, I., Bks. 6-7; Pike, History of the House of Lords, passim; J. N. Figgis, The Theory of the Divine Right of Kings (Cambridge, 1896); and G. P. Gooch, History of English Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1898). An excellent analysis of the system of government which the Stuarts inherited from the Tudors is contained in the introduction ...
— The Governments of Europe • Frederic Austin Ogg

... 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 conscience to-day. The worker was expected not only to ...
— War and the Future • H. G. Wells

... 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." ...
— The Memoirs of Napoleon Bonaparte • Bourrienne, Constant, and Stewarton



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



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