Lux Mundi: A Series of Studies in the Religion of the Incarnation, / 10th Edition, 1890

by Unknown

Now it is exactly at these points that the Church steps in to supplement the moral action of the State, not as one part supplements another part of a single whole, but rather as a higher supplements a lower order.

It is in its appeal to the higher motives that the State is weak: it is in its appeal to the higher motives that the Church is strong. If there have been times when the Church has allowed herself to claim or to assume temporal power, or without assuming it, to be so closely implicated with the secular authority that Church and State appeared to men as one body interested in and maintaining the existing order, if she has used the weapons of persecution, or handed men over to the secular arm, then has she so far weakened and loosened her own hold on the higher motives which move men to action. She may have become apparently more powerful, but it has always been at the cost, perhaps unperceived at the time, of some sacrifice of her own spirituality, and of the loftiness of that moral appeal in which her true strength lies. 'There is something in the very spirit of the Christian Church which revolts from the application of coercive force[419].'

And so, alongside of the moral minima of the secular law, the Christian Church maintains moral maxima, moral ideals, or rather a moral ideal, 'Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect[420].' 'Till we all come unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ[421].' It is not that the law is undervalued, or condemned, but that Christians are urged to bring their conduct under principles which will carry them far beyond the mere obedience to law. It is sufficient to quote from the Sermon on the Mount, 'Blessed are the meek.... Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake.... I say unto you, that ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also[422].'

The law and institutions of a people rest upon and give expression to a group of moral principles and ideals: they are not the only realization of those principles and ideals, but one; art and literature would be others; further, they realize them mainly on the negative side, in the mode of prohibition. As that group of principles and ideals changes, they change, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. At first sight it seems as if there was no essential difference in this respect between the laws and institutions of a nation, and the manners and institutions of the Christian Church, except that the one gives a more positive and constructive expression to the moral standard of the time than the other. But there is this difference, that the Christian Church has its moral standard in the past, in the life of the Son of Man; it too recognises change, as age succeeds age, but the new duties are regarded not as new, but as newly brought forth out of an already existing treasure, as the completer manifestation under new conditions of the meaning of the life of Christ. On the threshold of Christian morality there lies that by which all its subsequent stages may be tested, and which is the measure of advance or retrogression. It is this permanent element, preceding the element of change and of development, in Christian morality, which gives it its authority as against the moral product of one nation or one age.

It is exactly this authority which has enabled the Church to appeal with such force to duty as precedent to right, and to love as higher than justice. We can best illustrate this steady appeal to higher motives by tracing the steps by which Christian teachers have brought out, one by one, the different aspects of the relations of governors and governed looked at in the light of Christian anthropology and Christian sociology. The first principles governing the attitude of individual Christians towards the various organizations of human society are laid down in the words of Christ, 'Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's[423].' The command, taken in connection with its context, involves two principles, first, the recognition of the claims of civil society, and, secondly, their limitation by a higher order of claims, where they come into conflict with the first. The passage in the Epistle to the Romans[424], in which S. Paul deals with the duties of Christians towards 'the powers that be,' is a commentary on his Master's teaching. It shews the connection of the first of these principles with the second, by tracing it back to its ground in the will of God. It brings it into relation to love, the central motive of the Christian character. Briefly summarized, the stages of S. Paul's argument are as follows: (1) he shews that all power is of Divine origin: 'there is no power but of God.' Thus those who wield secular power are ministers of God. (2) The administration of earthly rewards and punishments by the secular power makes for good, and for this reason God uses it in His governance of the world. Therefore temporal authority is to be obeyed 'not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake,' i.e. not merely to avoid earthly punishment, but as a duty. (3) This duty may be regarded as one application of the general maxim of justice, 'Render to all their dues.' But (4) all these scattered dues are to a Christian summed up under one vast debt, always in process of payment, but never completely paid. 'Owe no man anything, but to love one another.' 'Love is the fulfilling of the law.' These passages of the New Testament put in the clearest light the duty of obedience to civil authority. They lay down its theological ground in the derivation of all power from God; and its moral ground by shewing that such obedience is one form of justice, and justice itself one aspect of love. They thus give to the commands of those wielding authority in human society the firmest sanctions. If on the one side Christianity seems to set up conscience, as the guardian of the things of God, against positive law, it gives on the other a Divine sanction and consecration to the whole order of things connected with the State by shewing its ministerial relation to, its defined place and function in, God's ordering of the world.

This was the side of our Lord's saying which needed enforcing on the Christians of S. Paul's time. The civil authority was the Roman Empire with its overwhelming force and its almost entire externality to Christianity. The danger, then, was the spirit of passionate revolt against the secular power. Men who were filled with the new wine of the Spirit, who were turning the world upside down, found it hard to submit to the decrees of an alien power, wielded by heathen: they pleaded their Christian liberty; they could not understand that such a power was 'ordained of God.' The early Christian Fathers found it sufficient, even when the Roman Empire was gradually becoming Christian, to bring home to consciences the teaching of S. Paul. There was no need then to emphasize in words the other side of our Lord's saying. There was little danger of undue subservience to the civil power being regarded with anything but disapproval: the danger was of men not giving it the obedience which was its due. 'We honour the Emperor,' says Tertullian[425], 'so far as we may, and so far as honour is due to him, as the first after God ... as one who has only God for his superior.' 'If the Emperor demands tribute,' says Ambrose[426], 'we do not refuse it: the lands of the Church pay tribute; if the Emperor wishes for our lands, he has the power to take them—none of us will resist him ... we render to Caesar what is Caesar's.' S. Augustine, with his Stoical leaning and his Roman sense of order, was little inclined to encourage men to resist, in any case, established powers. 'What matters it under whose rule a man lives who is to die, provided only his rulers do not force him to do impious and unjust things[427]?' Only in one passage of S. Chrysostom[428], among the writers of the first four centuries, is a gloss given to S. Paul's words, 'There is no power but of God,' which distinguishes the delegation of power in general from God, and the delegation of power by God to any particular ruler, and so suggests the possibility of a de facto ruler to whom obedience was not due.

But this attitude of the early Christian teachers was a very different thing from that attitude of the English Caroline divines, which gave so fatal a bent to the teaching of the English Church of the seventeenth century in the sphere which lies on the borderland of Theology and Politics. What the early Fathers taught their Christian followers was that it was their duty to obey in secular matters the powers lawfully set over them. What the English divines taught was the Divine right of princes and the subjects' duty of non-resistance. In the great battle which was being fought out in England between arbitrary power and freedom, they threw the whole weight of the English Church on the side of the former. It was a fatal error as a matter of policy, for it was the losing side. But, what is hardly sufficiently realized, it was most untrue to the tradition of the Church, and of the Church in England.

It was contrary to the tradition of the Church. For after the rise of Christianity to the high places of the world, followed by the break-up of the Roman Empire, and the formation of the mediaeval States, weakly knit together by personal ties, and with uncertain claims on the allegiance of their subjects, two new aspects of the relations of governors and governed had been brought out in Christian teaching. First, stress was laid on the duty of those holding power. Emperors and kings, magistrates and officers, who were Christians, had a claim for guidance and instruction in the exercise of their various functions. The claim was met by shewing them that, whatever the earthly source of authority may be, all just power is of God, and therefore must be regarded, not as a privilege, nor as a personal right, but as a trust to be undertaken for the good of others, and as a ministry for God and man. Thus a government which has for its aim anything else than the common good is, properly speaking, not a government at all. Whether its form is monarchical or not, it is simply a tyranny[429]. Secondly, the Middle Age theologians supplemented S. Paul's teaching by shewing the possible right of resistance to an unlawful government, or to one that failed to perform its duties. Such right of resistance might arise in two cases: (1) that of unjust acquisition of power, (2) that of its unjust use. Unjust acquisition might take place in two ways: (a) when an unworthy person acquired power, but by legitimate means: in this case it was the duty of subjects to submit, because the form of power came from God; (b) when power was acquired by force or fraud: in this case, subjects had the right to depose the ruler, if they had the power, supposing, however, that the illegitimate assumption of power had not been legitimated by subsequent consent. Unjust use might also take place in two ways: (a) when the ruler commanded something contrary to virtue, in which case it was a duty to disobey; or (b) when he went outside his rights, in which case subjects were not bound to obey, but it was not necessarily their duty to disobey. And so cases might arise in which it was lawful to enfranchise oneself, even from a legitimate power. 'Some who have received power from God, yet if they abuse it, deserve to have it taken from them. Both the one and the other come of God[430].'

Nor was the political teaching of the Caroline divines in agreement with the tradition of the Church in England. It is not necessary to go back to the great Archbishops who led, in earlier days, the struggle for English freedom. It is sufficient to recur to the teaching of the greatest of English post-Reformation theologians, at once soaked through and through with the spirit of Catholic antiquity, and in complete agreement with the English Reformation settlement. Richard Hooker had no sympathy with that doctrine of Divine right which his mediaeval masters looked upon as a quasi-heretical doctrine[431]. He found the first origin of government in the consent of the governed, and he anticipates Hobbes and Locke in his account of the 'first original conveyance, when power was derived from the whole into one[432].' Further, he points out that the king's power is strictly limited (except in the case of conquest or of special appointment by God), not only by the original compact, but also by after-agreement made with the king's consent or silent allowance[433]. And men are not bound in conscience to obey such usurpers 'as in the exercise of their power do more than they have been authorized to do[434].' But on the other hand, he maintains strongly, as against those who thought that human laws could in no sort touch the conscience, the duty of civil obedience in agreement with the law of God, and the sacredness, the 'Divine institution,' of duly-constituted authority, whether 'God Himself doth deliver, or men by light of nature find out the kind thereof.'

Thus, the main points which have been brought out by Christian teaching as to the relation of Christian citizens to the civil authority are: (1) first and foremost, the duty of obedience for conscience' sake, a duty which stands on the same level, and is invested with the same sanctions as the most sacred claims; (2) the duty, in case of the civil authority issuing commands contrary to virtue or religion, of disobedience on the same grounds as those which lead to obedience in the former case; (3) the duty of those wielding authority to use it for the common good, and so as not to hinder, if they cannot promote, the Christian religion; (4) the right, which may be said in certain extreme cases to rise almost to a duty, of resistance to the arbitrary or unconstitutional extension of authority to cases outside its province.