fies its own doctrine of obedience, because the law itself contradicts the Christian theory from which its authority is derived. The disciple, for conscience' sake, will suffer, because he can neither actively nor passively countenance a legal outrage of his moral sense. He takes no oaths before God, much less before the statue of the heathen Jove. And how plain the deduction is, that a disciple cannot be accessory in imposing upon others what he is willing to suffer from only because he is unwilling to obey. And finally, in the Epistle of Paul to Titus, he reiterates his Christian theory when he says, "Put them in mind to be subject to principalities and powers, to obey magistrates, to be ready to every good work." It is so clear that he presumes the magistrate to be coöperating with society for every good work, that we are not surprised when Peter and John are put in mind not to obey magistrates who decree that they shall not disturb the public peace by preaching Christianity. In such a crisis Peter places the restraint of an enlightened conscience upon this doctrine of obedience, and asks them to judge whether it be right in the sight of God to hearken unto them more than unto God. And when the council summon him, saying, “Did we not straitly command you" not to propagate these principles, he and all the other Apostles answered and said, "We ought to obey God rather than men "! How doubly winged with might is this right of conscience driven home to our hearts, when we see it wielded by the men who had been with Jesus, and had learned from him to thirst for righteousness and to obey the golden rule? How doubly careful should it make our conscience also to learn of Jesus, and to urge the rights of the individual soul, when he has made them known to us, with the force of

moral resistance, and, if it be necessary, with all the sufferings that power can inflict upon righteous disobedience!

Then from an examination of the Scripture doctrine, we find it pervadingly and strongly on the side of authority, but yet implicitly justifying Apostolic resistance, and assuming that exceptions may arise, making obedience to temporal anthority sinful. But who, or what source of authority, shall decide, when such an exception has arisen? It is plain from the Apostolic example, that our answer must be, Such a decision must be made by a conscience containing Christian principles. But, it is urged, by those who fear lest the authority of law become weakened, any conscience may pretend or imagine that it is inspired by Christian principles, and any man pronounce at pleasure that the law is vicious, and any crotchet may become an article of faith. Then the door is thrown wide open for all the disorders which breed in an agitated society, and there may be as many crises and revolutions as there are human idiosyncrasies. Any system of law is better than such a state of anarchy. Theoretically this is true: in fact it is nothing but an axiom to say that the restraint of an authority which is sometimes vicious is better than the dissolution of all society by the conflicting egotism of passionate and half-enlightened men. Nobody doubts that truism. But practically this danger is always very remote from every form of government; for two reasons; - first, because the law-abiding instinct is so powerful in the mass of men, that they are very slow to suspect authority, and the genuine call of conscience, in cases of exception, moves them with great difficulty; and secondly because, in every civilized government, the infliction of gross injustice is very rare compared with its general administration of

rights and order. Such is a practical answer to a possible objection. The mass of men have an inborn faith in law, and the object of government is protection, an average security, general rights, and justice. Here let me anticipate rebutting evidence, which a famous case in history is always supposed to furnish. What made the French Revolution a period when all the follies that vanity could engender crowded each other in quick succession, in the names of truth and liberty, to be alternately quenched in the blood and tears of so many victims? Because it is a dangerous thing to give men an opportunity to exercise the rights of conscience? Far from it; no case in history shows us so clearly the dreadful revenge of spiritual dissolution that follows frivolous and arbitrary power. For a century had the throne been using its legality as a cloak for maliciousness, and philosophy, inoculated with this spirit of caprice, trifled with the laws of human faith, and robbed conscience of its pure and absolute Christian material. So when corrupt authority became suddenly extinguished, the whirlwind was reaped where the wind was sown. Sanguinary egotism triumphed, not because there is danger in conscience, but because conscience had been demoralized by legal crime, and priestly apathy, and philosophical frivolity. Out from the foundations of a sensual throne, that had maintained for generations its consistency of vice, burst these wild waves that tossed so tumultuously before they found their rest. Such is the lesson of that period, in favor of the rights of a genuine and healthy conscience, by showing how organized corruption can educate a people to tread the steps of vanity and blood. Anarchy had been sitting on the throne long before it drove its phantoms, in derisive swiftness of succession, through the

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blood-stained streets. What kind of anarchy is so inwardly destructive, as that of a peaceful and triumphant iniquity? What disorder will compare with the orderly execution of a corrupt law? What strikes so bitterly at the inner peace, what relaxes so fatally the sense of moral obligation, and what shakes so rudely our reverence for a just and interposing God? What can we believe in, when disorder borrows all the elements and majesty of Law successfully to organize itself; when we see the powers that are ordained of God using their holy ordination to make a sin prevail? If there were danger in conscience, a thousand times better run that danger, than suffer the public sensibilities to be so shocked to see the Law, that servant of God, holding its ægis to shelter a corruption, and levelling its shining blade against the breast of justice. Can the preservation of material order atone for that? What shall it avail though streets and cities are never stirred from their propriety, if all the anarchy, impressing all the law, takes advantage of the public peace to wreak its will? The greater the tranquillity that attends the commission of a wrong, the greater is the tumult and disorder in the very citadel of human life!

But it is not enough to conclude that practically the right of conscience in a law-abiding community does not lead to anarchy. For a genuine conscience, in its indignation, may, like Peter in the garden, borrow the instruments of human passion to effect a righteous purpose. If Apostles have modified their doctrine of obedience by the exigency of a conscience, and if, therefore, we can find, in the last resort, no way for our individual salvation and no protection for truth except in the dictates of a Christian moral sense, how shall we use it in those rare cases

where the law violates equity and perpetrates what Jesus would condemn? How shall we use our conscience? In the first place, our opposition must never borrow the element of material force. We have no right as private citizens to maim or kill another citizen because he is in opposition to our conscience. The right of self-defence does not extend far enough to establish our personal principles by violence; however much legal or illegal power may outrage them, our resistance must still partake of the nature of a principle, and either suffer or conquer as a moral power. Because, violence introduces the whole train of personal vices, revenge, pride, hatred, bloodthirstiness, into the service of the spiritual nature; and the alliance is an abomination to the temper in which a Saviour's truth was glorified. You never heard of violence being undertaken in a pervading sense of religious sanctity; and men, struggling hand to hand and foot to foot, with white lips and flashing eyes, are never filled with the venerable dignity of the principles they may have soberly espoused. The animal must raven and triumph over all the spiritual powers, and indignation must sink down into fury, before a man can kill another man in the service of truth. That original service to which the genuine conscience bound itself has then been exchanged for the service of wrath; Justice drops her scales, and with madly uplifted point, but with still blindfold eyes, rushes into the middle of a brawl: No wonder that violence has so often destroyed the causes that hate its agency, and have no communion with its bestial deeds.

And especially in a republican form of government, where the voice of an enlightened people is the check to tyranny, and the grossest wrong might drop, with a silent vote, away to oblivion, violence defeats its purpose. It borrows