Cyrus, the Servant of-the Lord

This lecture was given in America in 1874.

I wish to speak to you to-night about one of those old despotic empires which were in every case the earliest known form of civilisation. Were I minded to play the cynic or the mountebank, I should choose some corrupt and effete despotism, already grown weak and ridiculous by its decay -- as did at last the Roman and then the Byzantine Empire -- and, after raising a laugh at the expense of the old system say: See what a superior people you are now -- how impossible, under free and enlightened institutions, is anything so base and so absurd as went on, even in despotic France before the Revolution of 1793. Well, that would be on the whole true, thank God; but what need is there to say it?