NOTE. Page 182.-"For he is the minister of God." Rom. xiii. 4. It is observable, that St. Paul has repeated this proposition no less than three times within the few sentences which he has given to this subject of obedience to civil government. The repeated inculcation of so strong a maxim cannot be regarded otherwise than as a very solemn testimony to it. In our English version, it is expressed in each of the three passages by the word "minister." But we may remark, in passing, that in the original there is a variation from the word diákovos, which had been used twice before, to λetrovрyòs, a more appropriate term, in the third passage, which relates specifically to tribute. If it were right to allow the term in this passage its most exact idiom of meaning, (and with St. Paul that word commonly has something of its idiomatic meaning,) it would imply, that the application of a public revenue for the maintenance of the general powers of civil government, is "a beneficial service of ex"pense," (λELTOvpyla,) authorized, like the other chief arrangements, by the same sanction. Aià TOUTO yàp Kai φόρους τελεῖτε· λειτουργοὶ γὰρ Θεοῦ εἰσιν, εἰς αὐτὸ τοῦτο προσκαρτερούντες. Whatever becomes of the exact image of thought intended by the word, the essential matter cannot be mistaken. The right of revenue is in terms declared to belong to the state; and considering how much ignorant or captious objection might have been made on this point, upon the perverted notion of a Christian liberty or a natural independence, the precise mention of it seems like a carefulness in setting our minds right where we might have erred. Obedience to the several ordinary forms of authority in civil government is therefore placed upon the strongest ground of obligation. But it ought not for a moment to be surmised from this doctrine, that any countenance is given by it to violent, unjust, or tyrannical power. The conscience of the governor is as much laid under an obligation as that of the subject. He is the minister of God; of course he is not set up for himself, nor for his own greatness or gratification. The character of him who acts in the name of a Divine appointment must be one of equity and beneficence. The magistrate especially is declared to be sent for the punishment of evil doers, and for the praise of them that do well. In the course of our Saviour's life and ministry, we find that He studiously avoided all interference with every thing of a civil, judicial, or political nature. Whether His reason for so doing were to avoid all occasion of offence, or, as it seems more correct to suppose, to shew that the origination and first spreading of the Gospel was wholly unconnected with the influence of any thing of established human power, the fact itself is exceedingly prominent in the accounts of the Evangelists. The harmony which subsists between His conduct in this respect and the very earnest doctrine of the Apostles, I should explain in this manner. He declined the most distant connexion with civil authority, to shew the great miracle of the Gospel: it was to be independent both of man and of the ordinary course of Providence. His Apostles had to instruct men who were to live under the ordinary dispensation of Providence combined with the Gospel. His life and ministry was "a new thing on the earth", and the evidence of it was to be as great and eminent as the work of mercy itself wrought by it. But neither the nature of man, nor the frame of things, was to be so changed by it, as to destroy the former work of God. Only the evil that was in the world, which was not introduced from the Creator, was to be remedied by the Redeemer. Something was to be changed, and something was to remain. In this last division we clearly see the reasonable faculties and the principles of human nature included. The Apostolic doctrine instructs us to add also the order of society to those things which were not to be changed. That both laws and government, while they remain entire in their structure, should yet be purified and informed by the Gospel, is as much within its scope as is the character of individuals. Princes and senates can have no principles of moral or political truth independent of the purest system of Divine Truth. And one sign of the actual influence of the Gospel will be in the integrity of governors, and the equity of public measures, as well as in the submissive habits of the subject. |