The system of government is autocratic, "unquestioning obedience" being required throughout all ranks.
But the sanctions of this law were vaguely and, for the most part, feebly imagined; its principles were essentially unwritten, and thus referred not to the external will of an Almighty Being who claimed unquestioning submission, but rather to the reason that gods and men shared, by the exercise of which alone they could be adequately known and defined.
Whatever the case, their unquestioning loyalty was comforting.
At once he welcomed the new "power" with an unquestioning evidence which could be shaken by neither the remonstrances or desertion of his dearest friends, the recantation of some of the principal agents of the "gifts," his own declension into a comparatively subordinate position, the meagre and barren results of the manifestations, nor their general rejection both by the church and the world.
We may notice, in the first place, that the conception of morality as a code which, if not in itself arbitrary, is yet to be accepted by men with unquestioning submission, tends naturally to bring into prominence the virtue of obedience to authority; just as the philosophic view of goodness as the realization of reason gives a special value to self-determination and independence (as we see more clearly in the post-Aristotelian schools where ethics is distinctly separated from politics).
