ons, and the apologists for Christianity loved to protest
their loyalty to the empire, and to think of their church as 'the soul
of the world,' maintaining it by prayer and virtue in the midst of
impiety and corruption.

In England this passage has often been put to two conspicuously
unjustifiable uses. First, it was the stronghold of the maintainers of
'the divine right of kings' and of 'passive obedience.' In reality it
asserts the divine right of civil authority, but not of any particular
kind of civil authority. Indeed the government of the empire was still
nominally a republic in its fundamental forms, though it was becoming a
despotism in fact. And supposing the senate and people had--as is of
course conceivable--reasserted their authority over their 'emperors,'
or military officers, the Christian doctrine of divine right would have
afforded no guidance as to which of the claimants to authority had the
divine will on its side. What is barely asserted is the divine right
of the existing civil authority, democratic or regal. And while our
passage exalts the normal duty of obedience, it suggests no answer to
the question--Is there not a point where a government so manifestly
fails to {124} maintain the divine order in the world, or to represent
the will of God and the best interests of the people, that it deserves
to be put an end to? At such a point Christianity can only serve to
reinforce the natural instincts of justice and right.

And again, the words, 'the powers that be are ordained of God:
therefore he that resisteth the power withstandeth the ordinance of
God,' have often been used in England to justify a claim on behalf of
the State to coerce and govern the Church and the consciences of men in
spiritual matters. But such an idea is utterly alien to the mind of
the New Testament. In the matters which concern our spiritual
salvation, the authority which is to discipline and control us is the
binding and loosing, absolving and retaining, authority which is
entrusted not to the State, but to the Church. Attempts are recorded
in history on the part of the State to crush out the Church, and on the
part of the Church to usurp the authority of the State and use its
weapons. Such attempts, we trust, belong to past history. An attempt,
too, specially identified with England, has been made to identify a
national Church and State as only different aspects of the same
society, so that the government of the n