These observations are as applicable to ministers as to other Christians; and, in addition, it may be remarked, that as ministers are bound not only to discharge the duties of good subjects, but to explain and recommend those duties to their people, in the course of their public instructions, they must be at once well acquainted with the principles of sacred Scripture on this subject, and with the political relations of those to whom they minister, to enable them to perform this part of their official duty like "workmen who need not be ashamed." The Apostle Paul was certainly both a very good Christian and a very good Christian minister, and, moreover, “spoke and wrote 66 as he was moved by the Holy Ghost;" and though equally removed from the meanness of the obsequious, time-serving political agent, and from the turbulence of the self-constituted reformer and factious demagogue-he yet, in the interesting paragraph which lies before us for exposition, enters briefly but comprehensively into a statement of the political relations and duties of the Christians to whom he was writing, and in this, as in everything else, he sets before Christian ministers in every age a fair example, after which they ought to account it their honour and their duty to copy. To understand thoroughly any book, not of a strictly scientific kind, it is necessary to be intimately acquainted with the events of the age and country in which it was written, and with the customs and habits of thought of the people to whom it was originally addressed. And there have been few sources of misapprehension and misinterpretation, in reference to ancient writings, more copious, than the coming to their perusal, with a mind unfurnished with the requisite previous knowledge, and entirely pre-occupied with the modes of thought and feeling which are prevalent in an age and country very remote from those to which the subject of study belongs, and possessing comparatively little in common with them, in literary, political, or religious chaI do not know if it would be easy to meet with a racter. more striking illustration and confirmation of this remark than in the manner in which the passage of Scripture now before us has been very generally misinterpreted in opposite ways, by those who have forgotten or overlooked the circumstances of the country and age in which it was written, and of the persons to whom it was addressed, and applied it to the resolution of a question highly important in itself, and closely connected with the subject of this paragraph, yet originating in a state of things totally different from that which must have been present to the Apostle's mind when he wrote it, and to meet which must have been his direct and primary object in writing it. Somewhat more than a century and a half ago, in consequence of the invasions made by the ill-principled and illadvised monarchs of the house of Stuart, on the civil and religious liberties of their country, and the resistance which their intolerable oppressions at last provoked from their much and long-enduring subjects, the question with regard to the limits of civil obedience excited a deep interest, and was agitated with much keenness and ability on both sides. On the one hand, it was maintained by Milton and Vane, and Locke and Hoadly, with invincible argument and overwhelming eloquence, that, civil government being an institution exclusively intended for promoting the security and welfare of the community at large, whenever that end is obviously not obtained—when the power which was created for the purpose of protecting life and property, is habitually and notoriously exercised in endangering or destroying both -it is the right and the duty of every man, by all lawful and constitutional means, to have the government so altered as to gain its end; and if all other methods be found ineffectual to secure the necessary alteration, that the people have the right, as well as the power, to put down so intolerable a tyranny by force. On the other hand, it was maintained by Barclay, and Hobbes, and Filmer, and Parker, and an almost innumerable host of expectants or possessors of ecclesiastical preferment, that governors hold their situation by divine right, and are accountable only to God for the exercise of the authority with which he has invested them; that whatever they command must be cheerfully obeyed (some holding this without limitation, teaching that the command of the magistrate is the subject's ultimate rule-others, admitting as an exception what is directly opposed to a clearly expressed divine command), that whatever they inflict must be patiently borne, however unjust, and that in no case can subjects resist or oppose magistrates without exposing themselves to eternal damnation. The courtly divines who espoused these latter opinions loudly appealed to the authority of the New Testament; and the thirteenth chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans was counted the very citadel of their cause. In the agitation of passion utterly forgetting, or warped by interest, studiously keeping out of view, that the circumstances of the Christians in Rome, a small body, chiefly of the lower orders, many of them foreigners,-under a Heathen government, essentially absolute, over which they had and could have no control, and the circumstances of the British nation-with few exceptions making a profession of Christianity,-under a government administered by men professing Christianity, essentially free, on whose management the constitution gives the subjects the means of making an impression by petition or representation, and whose very existence depends on their will, were by no means parallel-from the passage before us they attempted to prove that the existing government was the ordinance of God, its administrators his appointed ministers, and that whosoever resisted them, violated the law of Christ, and drew down on himself the righteous vengeance of Heaven. It is painful to reflect that one misinterpretation of Scripture ordinarily leads to another, and that, not only by him who misinterprets, but often also by those who oppose him. Instead of making their stand on the grand leading principles of sound reason and well-interpreted Scripture, and asserting that the passage before us had no direct bearing on the limits of civil obedience, some of the able and noble-minded enemies of the doctrines of the divine right of monarchs to absolute authority-of passive obedience and non-resistance, set themselves to the vain and mischievous attempt to show that the Apostle does not here describe the Roman government, and enjoin the duties of Christians under it-that he has no reference to any existing government, but that he lays down the principles on which civil government should be constituted, and unfolds the duties which subjects owe to such a government. Following out these principles to their fair results, some of them arrived at the conclusion, that Christians are not morally bound to yield obedience to any government, unless it is constituted and administered in accordance with what they consider the principles of Divine revelation. All this misinterpretation on both sides might have been avoided by attending to the object which the Apostle had in view in these remarks, and to the mode of thinking, prevalent among at least the Jewish converts to Christianity, which rendered the prosecution of that object necessary. We know that among the Jews the opinion, grounded on a mistaken apprehension as to the meaning, or rather reference, of a passage in the law of Moses* was prevalent, that no Gentile government could have legitimate authority over "the holy nation," Jehovah's" peculiar people"-that God was their king, that they were not bound to obey any subordinate authority which had not his express appointment, and that prudence, not conscience, was the ground of their submission to the Roman yoke; while some went yet farther, and held that it was unlawful to give any token of subjection to a heathen power. The first Christians generally, and the members of the church of Rome in particular, were many of them converts * Deut. xvii. 14, 15. from Judaism; and it was not certainly a matter of course that they should lose these prejudices on embracing Christianity. On the contrary, it seems highly probable, though (as Dr. Paley remarks) "neither the Scripture, nor any subsequent history of the Church, furnish any direct attestation"* of the fact, that the notions which have in after ages been repeatedly revived, of the freedom of the saints from all secular authority, and their rightful dominion over the rest of mankind, like most other errors, prevailed to a certain extent in the primitive times. To such sentiments the Apostle Peter seems to allude when he exhorts Christians to conduct themselves " as free, and yet not using their liberty as a cloak of maliciousness" (sedition, as Dr. Paley interprets it), but as the servants of God.”† 66 Admitting the supposition, certainly a highly probable one, that some such sentiments were actually entertained, or the undoubted fact, that in the former opinions of many of the Christians at Rome, there was a natural source of such sentiments, nothing could be less expected on the part of the Apostle, than a dissertation on the fundamental principles of civil government, or on the precise limits within which obedience to a government, founded on these principles, should be confined. What we naturally look for in the circumstances of the case is a clear statement and powerful enforcement of the duty of the Roman Christians to the government under which they were placed, fitted to prevent or put down mistaken notions, which, if followed out to their practical consequences, might have led to results the most destructive to themselves, and the most disastrous to the Christian cause. The paragraph before us exactly answers this expectation. It "inculcates the duty-it does not describe the extent of it. It enforces the obligation by the proper sanctions of Christianity, without intending either to *Paley's "Moral and Political Philosophy," Works, vol. i. p. 329. Lond. 1825. 1 Peter ii. 16. |