Page:Thomas Hare - The Election of Representatives, parliamentary and municipal.djvu/202

man's person,—abase the proud and lift up the lowly,—punish the wicked and protect and nourish the just;—and it ends with a benediction that supplicates for the soyereign a faithful senate, wise and upright counselors and magistrates, a loyal nobility, and a dutiful gentry; a pious, learned, and useful clergy; an honest commonalty,—and the universal love and reverence. These supplications are echoed, it may be at other times and in other forms of expression, by every Christian minister and congregation. The service should have a suitable parallel on the day of the election of the representative assembly, which should be set apart throughout the kingdom for the business of the election alone. A special service might be appointed by the Church,—and all other persuasions invited, according to their several manners, to solemnise the public act, and seek for it the divine blessing. In so doing, we "act on the only received and uniformly continued sense of mankind. That sense not only, like a wise architect, hath built up the august fabric of states, but like a provident proprietor, to preserve the structure from profanation and ruin, as a sacred temple, purged from all the impurities of fraud, and violence, and injustice, and tyranny, hath solemnly and for ever consecrated the commonwealth, and all that officiate in it. This consecration is made, that all who administer in the government of men, in which they stand in the person of God himself should have high and worthy notions of their function and destination; that their hope should be full of immortality; that they should not look to the paltry pelf of the moment, nor to the temporary and transient praise of the vulgar, but to a solid permanent existence, in the permanent part of their nature, and to a permanent fame and glory, in, the example they leave as a rich inheritance to the world." … "Every sort of moral, every sort of civil, every sort of politic institution, aiding the rational and natural ties that connect the human understanding and affections to the divine, are not more than