‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.… Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.’—Rom. xiii. 1, 7.
It is impossible, I think, to read the Epistles of the New Testament with any degree of attention, and not to see how anxious the writers are that the Christianity which they preach should not be regarded as a revolutionary and explosive force, upsetting and destroying existing institutions, social and political; how concerned they are that their converts should give no offence (beyond what was involved in the fact of their religion) to the heathen neighbours among whom they lived; that they should ‘Walk in wisdom toward them that are without[949],’ and have their ‘conversation honest among the Gentiles[950]’; how careful they are to say no word which should disturb the existing relations of slaves and masters, of wives and husbands, of subjects and sovereigns; even though the sovereign, the husband, the master might be heathen, and the slave, the wife, the subject might be Christian. If there must be a breach, let it come from the heathen member of the bond. The rule for the Christian was: ‘let him not depart[951].’
And, in thus writing, the Apostles were but following out the teaching and example of our Lord Himself. When He compares the kingdom of Heaven to leaven[952], He means, I suppose, that the working of His doctrine was to be, as a rule, gradual and assimilative, not sudden and explosive.
And He Himself always refused to assume the part of a political agitator, or even of a social reformer, which His followers sometimes wished to thrust upon Him. ‘He withdrew Himself,’ when the multitudes threatened to ‘take Him by force, to make Him a king[953]’; He would not be ‘a judge or a divider’ in matters of inheritance[954]. All social and political problems He left men to work out for themselves with the powers which God has given them, under the guidance and control of God’s ordinary providence; and to apply for themselves to the solution of these problems the principles of His teaching, under the ordinary operations of the Holy Spirit. And this refusal to interfere with the normal development of human society emphasises all the more, as has been remarked[955]. His uncompromising vindication of the law of marriage, as the one social institution the sanctity of which is above all human laws: ‘God made them male and female[956].’
He would not agitate against the tribute[957]; though the refusal probably cost Him the popularity which had manifested itself so noisily in the triumphal entry. And, in His trial before Pilate, He distinctly recognised the Roman provincial government of Judaea, heathen and foreign though it was, as being divinely ordered: ‘Thou couldest have no power at all against me, except it were given thee from above[958].’
When the publicists of the middle ages, with Dante at their head, laid stress on the birth and death of Christ under the Roman Empire as giving a divine authority to that Empire, and to the mediaeval Empire which claimed to be its successor[959], they were but carrying to somewhat fanciful extremes an argument based upon undoubted facts.
And so St. Paul, in the passage which I have taken for my text, claims no less than a divine sanction for the civil power: ‘The powers that be are ordained of God.… Render therefore to all their dues.’ And the magnitude of the claim is enhanced, if we remember that this was written, not under any of the better Roman emperors; not under Trajan, whose virtues so touched the heart of the Middle Ages, that they represented his soul as transferred to Paradise through the intercession of St. Gregory, the apostle of the English[960]; not under a philosophic saint like Marcus Aurelius; but, probably, under the vain and vicious Nero.
If then such was the claim on the duty of subjects then, how much greater the claim on us, who, for more than sixty years, have lived under one of the very best of Christian sovereigns.
We can most of us remember the kind of thought and speech which was prevalent not so many years ago. It was a common impression then that the part to be played by the institution of Royalty in the future history of the world was a very slight one. The growth of popular power, the spread of education, and other causes, would reduce it to be nothing more than the veil, and a very transparent veil, of a Democracy.
The history of the last quarter of a century has signally falsified this forecast; and the present state of Europe gives it an emphatic contradiction. At the present moment the question of war or peace, that is for thousands, if not millions, the question of life or death, hangs upon the fiat of some four or five men.