Theocracy. This is what one calls a government in which a nation is submitted immediately to God, who exercises his sovereignty over her, and who makes her know his will by the organ of the prophets and ministers to whom he is pleased to manifest himself.

The Hebrew nation provides us with the only example of a true theocracy . This people, whom God had made his inheritance, groaned for a long time under the tyranny of the Egyptians, when the eternal, remembering his promises, resolved to break their bonds and to put them in possession of the land that he had destined for them. He stirred up a prophet for their deliverance, to whom he communicated his will; this was Moses. God chose him to be the liberator of his people and to prescribe for them the laws of which he himself was the author. Moses was only the organ and the interpreter of the will of heaven, he was the minister of God, who had reserved for himself sovereignty over the Israelites; this prophet prescribed to them in his name the worship that they had to follow, and the laws that they had to observe.

After Moses, the Hebrew people were governed by judges, whom God permitted him to choose. The theocracy did not cease for that reason; the judges were the arbitrators of differences and the generals of armies: assisted by a senate of seventy old men, it was permitted to them neither to make new laws, nor to challenge those which God had prescribed; in extraordinary circumstances, they were obliged to consult the high priest and the prophets, to know the will of heaven. Thus one regulated one’s conduct after the direct inspiration of the Divinity. This theocracy lasted up to the time of Samuel; then the Israelites, through unheard of ingratitude, wearied of being governed by the orders of God himself, they wished, just like the idolatrous nations, to have a king who would command them and who would gain respect for their armies. The prophet Samuel, consulted on this change, addressed himself to the Lord who responded to him I heard the people , it is not you whom they reject, it is myself . Therefore the eternal, in his anger, consents to give them a king; but not without ordering his prophet to announce to these ingrates the inconveniences of this royalty which they prefer to theocracy.

“Here,” Samuel said to them, “is what will be the rights of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons, and make them carry him on their shoulders; he will traverse the cities in triumph; among your children, some will go by foot in front of him, and the others will follow him like vile slaves; He will force them to join his armies; he will make them serve as laborers in his fields, and reap his harvest; he will choose among them artisans for his luxury and his pomp; he will destine your daughters for vile and base services; he will give your best inheritance to his favorites and his servants; to enrich his courtesans, he will take a tenth of your revenue; finally, you will be his slaves, and it will be useless for you to implore his clemency, because God will not hear you, especially as you are the workers of your own unhappiness.” See Samuel, ch. viii, verse 9. This is how the prophet showed the Israelites the rights which their king would arrogate to himself; such were the threats that God made towards his people, when they wanted to remove themselves from his power and to submit themselves to that of a man. Nevertheless, flattery makes use of the very threats of the prophet in order to turn them into titles for despots. Some perverse and corrupt men pretended that, by these words, the Supreme Being approved of tyranny and gave his sanction to the abuse of power. Although in this way God had made known to the Hebrews the dangers of the power that they were going to give to one among them, they persisted in their demand. “We will be,” they said, “like other nations, we want a king who judges us, and who goes before us against our enemies.” Samuel shows God the obstinacy of his people; the eternal, irritated, only responds with the words, give them a king : the prophet obeys in giving them Saul; this ended the theocracy .

Although the Israelites were the only people who provide for us the example of a true theocracy , we have nevertheless seen impostors, who, without having the mission of Moses, established over ignorant and captivated peoples an empire that they persuaded them was that of the Divinity. In this way, among the Arabs, Mohammed made himself the prophet, legislator, pontiff, and the sovereign of a crude and subjugated nation; the Koran contains all at once the dogmas, morals, and the civil laws of the Muslims. We know that Mohammed claimed to have received these laws from the mouth of God himself; this so-called theocracy lasted for many centuries under the caliphs, who were the sovereigns and the pontiffs of the Arabs. Among the Japanese, the power of the Dairi, or ecclesiastical emperor, resembled that of a theocracy , before the Cubo , or secular emperor had put boundaries on his authority. One finds vestiges of a similar empire among the ancient Gauls; the druids exercised the functions of priests and judges of the people. Among the Ethiopians and the Egyptians, priests ordered kings to give themselves over to death, when they had displeased the Divinity; in a word there is hardly a country where the priesthood has not made an effort to establish its authority over the souls and bodies of men.

Although Jesus Christ had declared that his kingdom was not of this world, in centuries of ignorance, one saw the Christian pontiffs struggle to establish their power on the ruins of that of kings. They claimed to place crowns with an authority that only belonged to the sovereign of the universe.

Those were the pretensions and maxims of Gregory VII, Boniface VIII, and many other Roman pontiffs, who profiting from the superstitious stupidity of the people, armed them against their natural sovereigns, and covered Europe with carnage and horrors. It is over these bloody cadavers of many millions of Christians that the representatives of the God of peace raised the edifice of a chimerical power, of which men were for a long time sad toys and miserable victims. In general, history and experience prove to us that the priesthood always endeavors to introduce on the earth a type of theocracy ; priests only want to submit themselves to God, that invisible sovereign of nature, or to one from among themselves, whom they have chosen to represent the Divinity; they wanted to form in the estates a separate estate, independent from the civil power; they claimed to hold only from the Divinity the goods that men had obviously placed into their possession. It is left to the wisdom of sovereigns to repress these ambitious and idealistic pretentions, and to contain all members of society within the just boundaries that reason and the tranquility of the states prescribe.

A modern author regarded theocracy as the first form of government that all nations had adopted; he claimed that, following the example of the universe, which is governed by one sole God, men gathered together in society would want no other monarch than the Supreme Being. As man had only imperfect and human ideas of this celestial monarch, he raised up for him a palace, a temple, a sanctuary, and a throne and gave to him officers and ministers. He was not slow to represent the invisible God of the society by emblems and symbols that indicated some of his attributes; little by little they forgot that which the symbol designated, and they gave to the symbol that which was due only to the Divinity that it represented; that was the origin of idolatry which the priests, failing to instruct the people, or out of self-interest, themselves produced. These priests had no trouble governing men in the name of mute and inanimate idols of which they were the ministers; a dreadful superstition covered the face of the earth under this priestly government, it infinitely multiplied sacrifices, offerings, in a word, all practices useful to the visible ministers of a hidden Divinity. The priests, prideful of their power, abused it strangely; that was their incontinence. Which, according to the author, gave birth to this race of men who claim to be descendents of gods, and who are known in mythology by the name of demigods . Men, exhausted by the insupportable yoke of the ministers of theocracy , wished to have among themselves living symbols of the Divinity, they therefore chose kings, who would be for them the representatives of the invisible monarch – Soon they gave to them the same honors that they had given before to the symbols of theocracy ; they were treated as gods, and they treated men as slaves, who, believing to be always submitted to the Supreme Being, forgot to restrain by advantageous laws the power that these weak images could abuse. According to the author, there is the true source of despotism, that is to say of this arbitrary and tyrannical government under which the people of Asia still groan today, without daring to reclaim the rights of nature and of reason, which will for man to be governed by his happiness. See Priests.