ment; God has placed me on this American soil, not the government; God is to me the source of all my rights and privileges, my obligations and duties, not the government. And where he gives me existence and a sphere of action, there am I to stay without asking whether before or since my birth tyrants have presumed to set up their laws over it.

To

Then, again, a few scriptures are hurled against the doctrine of exclusive obedience to the Divine in Law. To Cæsar, the things which are Cæsar's. Not, however, the things which are not Cæsar's. To all, their dues, their own; to none, however, that which belongs to others, their due, their own. God, the things which are God's. So when Cæsar usurps what is not his, but God's, I will try to render what I can to him whose in reality all is, even against Cæsar, when in his rapacity he would rob even God. Then Paul is for ever at hand. The passage I shall assume to be familiar to you all. Let us now mark a few things. Whatever is written in a broad and unqualified manner, as an oration or a letter, must, of course, be limited and qualified by the universal maxims of common sense. A man like Paul, could not, for instance, be imagined to require of those to whom he wrote, that, supposing the magistrates required them to abjure their faith, they should do it. So, too, whatever is thus written must be limited and qualified, or rather interpreted, by the conscious and deliberate action of the writer. But Paul's own life, though consistent always with what he received as authoritative law, was of his own choice pread

justed to relations with the governments, whether in Judea or Rome, which brought against him prosecutions, trials, punishments, and finally death. Further, let us take his own qualifications, or, as they may be truly called, grounds, of the doctrine which he teaches. The powers of government are of Divine appointment, therefore we should submit. But he nowhere teaches, that if impious and audacious men usurp those powers, and wield them for the destruction of justice and truth; if they com mand, on penalty of death, sacrifice to the false gods and rejection of the Messiah; if they require Christians in any way to violate the principles and the laws of Jesus, these requirements should be fulfilled, these edicts obeyed. He adds, Rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil: The magistrate is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Such his statement of government according to the idea which it represents, so far as apprehended by Paul. Now let us suppose a case of fact: the ruler becomes a terror to good works, not to the evil; he forbids doing good, and punishes it according to the fashion of his time; he requires doing evil, and follows it with favor. He becomes the minister of injustice, executing wrath upon him that doeth good. The case is perfectly supposable; bring it before Paul; what would he say? His whole life is the answer. He disobeyed the powers, and suffered for it. Precisely this, his steadfast

obedience to the Voice which power forbade him to utter, is the crown of his glory, the pledge of his everlasting remembrance. Precisely this it is which has consecrated the saints, the sages, the heroes, the martyrs of all ages. They heard a voice which others did not hear, or hearing, rejected; they saw the vision which others did not see, or seeing, for. sook; and away from the world, they went truly on their solitary path until the world raised them by its persecutions to the stars.

Even if it were otherwise; if we had no precedents of great and toiling men in the past; or if, through ignorance or from any cause, Apostles and wise men had failed to set forth the right of the private conscience, and the absolute supremacy of the law which it perceives written within it; still that law stands independent, unalterable, everlasting; allowing no evil, even to escape evil or to advance good; not the servant of power, but the fountain and the guide of power; not the creature nor the thrall of empires or republics, but their ruler, executing itself according to its own judgments on them all; with the revelation of its reality to the soul, assuring us of our obligation, not our right only, our absolute obligation, to put beneath us all statutes, all powers, which we see to contradict itself. It bids rulers or people, if they would have their decrees obeyed, to have them first fit to be obeyed, and denounces their tyrannies as what true men should disobey for their reverence of order and of law. It bids the individual, as he would do homage to the majestic form of law, to withhold all

respect from the monstrous abortions, the infernal shadows, which take its name, and put on its robes, and exercise its functions, only to profane them and to degrade men, nay, to dethrone God. I would beseech you, for the reverence of God and the love of Jesus, to receive this word. I mean it for the hour. I mean it for laws now existing. I mean it, in the full persuasion that this, this, is the very time, when, to obey God, we must disobey men; when, against cruel edicts and heartless customs, against the powers of states and the falsehoods of churches, and the thousand sophistries which are urged to make the worse appear the better reason, we are to stand fast by the oracle, hearing and doing that, and only that, which it bids: So God is with us!

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SERMON XX.

THE ETERNAL RECTITUDE.

LUKE xii. 57.

WHY EVEN OF YOURSELVES JUDGE YE NOT WHAT IS RIGHT?

A YOUNG man, just passing out of boyhood, read the volume in which Price set forth his high and fervid conceptions of the eternity, the independence, and the worth of virtue. To his mind there was something of significance in thoughts compressed into such declaration as this: "Virtue is of intrinsic value and of indispensable obligation; not the creature of will, but necessary and immutable; not local and temporary, but of equal extent and antiquity with the Divine Mind; not a mode of sensation, but everlasting truth; not dependent on power, but the guide of all power." Not far from the same time he read also the words of a sainted man, from whose lips he had often heard most im. pressive exhortations to the true life, in whose character he had seen the majestic beauty of goodness, and by whose serene faith in his last hours the immortal hope had become more intimate to the soul. There, among words consecrated by reverend mem