solve. Those who proclaimed the
assistance of a higher authority had indeed drawn a metaphysical barrier
before the governments, but they had not known how to make it real. All
that Socrates could effect by way of protest against the tyranny of the
reformed democracy was to die for his convictions. The Stoics could only
advise the wise man to hold aloof from politics, keeping the unwritten
law in his heart. But when Christ said: "Render unto Caesar the things
that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," those words,
spoken on His last visit to the Temple, three days before His death,
gave to the civil power, under the protection of conscience, a
sacredness it had never enjoyed, and bounds it had never acknowledged;
and they were the repudiation of absolutism and the inauguration of
freedom. For our Lord not only delivered the precept, but created the
force to execute it. To maintain the necessary immunity in one supreme
sphere, to reduce all political authority within defined limits, ceased
to be an aspiration of patient reasoners, and was made the perpetual
charge and care of the most energetic institution and the most universal
association in the world. The new law, the new spirit, the new
authority, gave to liberty a meaning and a value it had not possessed in
the philosophy or in the constitution of Greece or Rome before the
knowledge of the truth that makes us free.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 2: An address delivered to the members of the Bridgnorth
Institution at the Agricultural Hall, 26th February 1877.]

II

THE HISTORY OF FREEDOM IN CHRISTIANITY[3]

When Constantine the Great carried the seat of empire from Rome to
Constantinople he set up in the marketplace of the new capital a
porphyry pillar which had come from Egypt, and of which a strange tale
is told. In a vault beneath he secretly buried the seven sacred emblems
of the Roman State, which were guarded by the virgins in the temple of
Vesta, with the fire that might never be quenched. On the summit he
raised a statue of Apollo, representing himself, and enclosing a
fragment of the Cross; and he crowned it with a diadem of rays
consisting of the nails employed at the Crucifixion, which his mother
was believed to have found at Jerusalem.

The pillar still stands, the most significant monument that exists of
the converted empire; for the notion that the nails which had pierced
the body of Christ became a fit ornament for a heathen ido