Education Quote by Ezra Stiles

A monarchy conducted with infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence is a perfect government the way a fire that never burns you is a perfect tool. Stiles, a New England clergyman steeped in Reformed theology, isn’t really lobbying for kings; he’s smuggling a sermon into a political sentence. The bait is “monarchy,” a charged word in the late 18th-century Atlantic world, especially as Americans were busy unlearning deference to crowns. The switch is “infinite.” Stiles loads the claim with an attribute no human ruler can meet, then lets the fantasy stand as an ideal against which real regimes should be measured and found wanting.

The intent is didactic: to separate forms of government from the moral quality of governors, while also reminding readers that only God qualifies for the kind of rule monarchy promises in its own propaganda. “Infinite wisdom” and “infinite benevolence” are not civic virtues; they’re divine ones. The subtext is Augustinian: humans are fallen, power corrupts because the heart is already crooked, and any political arrangement that assumes near-perfect rulers is a category error. In that sense, the line reads like a critique of absolutism dressed as a concession.

Context matters: colonial ministers were deeply invested in legitimating resistance without sanctifying rebellion. Stiles’ formulation threads that needle. He grants the theoretical allure of a single, unified will (order, coherence, paternal care), then quietly removes it from the realm of earthly possibility. The result is a neatly weaponized conditional: monarchy is perfect only in heaven, which is another way of saying it’s dangerously imperfect on earth.