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LECTURE III.

THE ANSWER OF CHRIST, AND THE DEVELOPMENTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY.

"If thou let this man go, thou art not Cæsar's friend." —ST. JOHN xix. 12.

HE charge which the Jews preferred against

THE

Jesus-that, in making himself a king, he put himself and his kingdom into opposition to the Cæsar and his imperial power-was both false and true. It was false in the sense in which the Jews intended it. It was true in a deeper sense than they or Pilate could understand. Jesus had already completely renounced all claim to sovereignty over the kingdoms of this world; and it was the capital fault which the Jews found in him, that he had made and persisted in such renunciation. Not only so, but with equal persistency he had refused, both to ally himself with and to antagonize the civil power, upon the ground so little understood in that day and since, that his "kingdom is not of this world." The conspicu

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ous indifference of Jesus to temporal honors, and his utter refusal of temporal authority, even when his countrymen were eager to thrust it upon him, were sufficient evidence of the falseness and malignity of the charge that was made against him. Nevertheless, it was true that there was an irreconcilable antagonism between the theocratic imperialism of the Cæsar and the gospel of the kingdom of God. In that gospel a principle was set in operation among men, that was sure, sooner or later, to work human emancipation. It was a principle, that in individualizing man, in awaking him to a realizing sense of his personal dignity and personal responsibility, and in raising him by faith and through grace "into the glorious liberty of the children of God," was, sooner or later, to' render all human tyrannies utterly intolerable, -a principle which, unless the Church had unworthily consented in a woful after-time to surrender it, would long since have banished Cæsarism, with its preposterous claim of divine right, from the face of the earth. was a profound and irreconcilable issue, then, between Christianity and the theocratic imperialism of the Cæsar; but it was not to be settled

There

in Pilate's judgment-hall: nor did Pilate, or the noisy mob who clamored before the prætorium for the "innocent blood," understand that issue at all. It was not to be settled by condemning Jesus the king, nor by smiting him to death. It was not to be settled by the stroke of fiery persecutions, nor by the oppositions of either superstition or philosophy.. It was not to be settled by the surrender of the Christian Church to the same haughty and theocratic imperialism in the person of Constantine, emperor and "Pontifex Maximus." It was not to be settled by the establishment of the daring claim of the Papacy to supreme temporal and spiritual power. It was not to be settled by the resumption in England of imperial supremacy over the Church by English kings. It was not to be settled by the erection of the revolutionary theocracy of the Commonwealth upon the ruins of such supremacy. It was not to be settled in any alliance between Church and State, any more than in the triumph of either over the other; but it was to be settled in the adjustment finally to be made between membership and discipleship in a purely spiritual and theocratic kingdom on the one hand,

and citizenship in a purely secular and civil society on the other.

I need not recapitulate what has been said already of the evils which resulted from the Church's surrender to Constantine, and from the subsequent development of Byzantinism and the Papacy. From the last of these the English Church was happily freed at the Reformation, but it was not her happiness then to escape from the tyranny of the temporal power. Indeed, under the virtual concordat then and subsequently forced upon her, she has been compelled to do duty as an Establishment, and too often to become the instrument of, and the apologist for, the arbitrary and tyrannical exercise of the civil authority. The peculiar calamity of this most unhappy conjunction cannot be exaggerated. For centuries the English Church has occupied a false position, and has been held responsible for the very oppression of which she herself has been the worst victim. It is difficult for an American Churchman to repress a feeling of sorrowful indignation when he remembers how our mother Church has been used by many a despotic cabal under Tudor and Stuart and Hanoverian, by Whig and Tory administra

tions, by secularist and infidel ministries, to serve ends utterly alien to her true polity, and to further purposes, which, if her true voice could have been heard, she would have renounced as utterly unworthy. It is a truth which cannot, I believe, be too much insisted on, that almost all the evils which have afflicted and still afflict English Christianity have been caused or provoked by the burden of the royal supremacy which the English Church has had thrust upon her. In consenting to do duty as a Church established by law, she has apparently identified herself and her fortunes with a merely human power. It was against this arrangement, and the policy which resulted from it, and not necessarily against the Church as Christ's kingdom, that English nonconformity was first arrayed, until such nonconformity was in some instances driven out by the secular arm, and made strong and formidable by persecution. So calamitous was this ill-omened alliance, that the revolution which first hurled the Stuart dynasty from the throne dragged the Church down with it; and it was not till the Stuarts were finally banished from the kingdom, that the Church was delivered from the task, long so servilely per

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