The Ministry of Sovereigns

“He is the minister of God to thee for good.”—Romans xiii. 4.

The passage: The ruler is God’s minister to you, for your good.

We the clergy call ourselves Ministers. You grant us this title even when you refuse others we claim. It sounds humble, as if we gave up any right to be masters. Yet it has often produced, and still sometimes produces, the opposite effect in clergy and laity alike. Any exclusive claim, even to the meanest office, can puff up the one who makes it. Others find the claim more monstrous the greater its contrast with the thing claimed. I suppose the arrogance seems greater, not less, when we fill in the missing words and say with St. Paul, “We are ministers of God.” Yet it is dangerous to leave open whether we mean this or something quite different. Every holder of our office must in some sense be a minister. He must serve his own tastes, notions and imaginary interests, or those of the people among whom he works. Or he must boldly say, “I am the minister of God; my commission is from Him.” That risks exalting him in his own eyes, winning superstitious reverence, or exposing him to ridicule when he fails to live up to it. But even when we say it and believe it, we have gained little. The name is awful, but it is familiar. To most people it suggests a round of duties expected of a certain set of persons. A few, taught by history, may take offence. They may hint that the Servus Servorum set his foot on the neck of kings, and that others in the same livery set theirs on the necks of peoples. But for one with such fears there will be nine who think the phrase an innocent fiction. Hardly an hour of the day passes without tempting each of us to think so too.

What escape is there from these opposite dangers, which keep succeeding each other, of ecclesiastical pretension and ecclesiastical impotence? I know only this. We should hold firmly to the name that something higher than law or custom first gave us, and which they have ratified. And we should affirm just as firmly in everyone’s hearing that the name is a sign to them as well as to us. We are called Ministers of God so that they may be reminded what they are, and it is as great a sin in them as in us to take any position below this. If we do this honestly, we need not fear that we shall pass for more than we are worth on the strength of a name, or that the name will be undone by the boasting that goes with it, or that it will count as one of those safe and harmless lies the world allows itself. The word will again carry, as every word should, both healing power and a sting.

I. In the chapter my text comes from, St. Paul speaks of civil rulers as ministers of God. He does not soften his language to suit his time. He does not say emperors and kings ought to be ministers of God, or that it would be well if they would consent. He says plainly, “They are ministers of God.” It is not in their pleasure not to be. They must be, however much they dislike the necessity or fiercely rebel against it. Nero’s will might be devilish, but every power he wielded was Divine. No energy of body or mind that he abused came from an evil source, and none was his own. He had been appointed to rule the world he tormented by the One who loved that world. He was the steward of God’s treasures even while he spent them making miserable the people they were meant to bless.

How would such a doctrine affect the Christians of the Roman Church? Would it make them look with more slavish fear and reverence on those who wore the trappings of power? Would it make them feel less horror at those who turned power to the destruction of their fellow-men? When they remembered where power came from, and what that Power was which called heaven and earth into being and renews them every morning, they could not confuse vital power with the outward accidents of it that our vulgar nature admires and envies. They must hate every cruel and wanton use of power when they thought, “The royalty of kings and emperors is only the reflection of the royalty He showed in its fulness, who healed the sick, cast out devils, and went about doing good.” No doubt regarding Nero as a minister of God made them patient under his government, so far as it touched themselves, and afraid to engage in mad schemes to overthrow it. But this faith gave strength to their cries that the earth might be delivered from all her oppressors. It assured them those cries would not be in vain. It made them welcome their own sufferings as steps toward the Redemption.

Those who try the hard task of finding excuses for tyranny in Scripture sometimes ask triumphantly: if Nero’s power was ordained by God according to St. Paul, what subjects can claim that the powers over them have some lower origin? I answer, “Certainly none.” And subjects would be unwise to wish their case an exception to the Apostle’s rule; they should insist on being brought within it. For what does it mean? That every power is a trust. That every power by its nature implies responsibility. That this responsibility is not to some imaginary judge who will not call the wrongdoer to account, but to a real Judge standing at the door, whom the greatest criminal cannot escape. Read the history of the Roman Empire in the light of St. Paul’s sentence. Every sting of conscience that visited Nero the night he knew himself his mother’s murderer was a message: “You are God’s minister, and you have used His sword against your own flesh and blood.” The assassin by whom he finally fell was saying: “You are God’s minister, and so am I, guilty like you, but ordained to summon you to His Judgment-seat, to declare what you have done with the millions He committed to you.”

Surely, brethren, if people and rulers believed this, it would be something more than the notion that they may be brought before a bar we call “public opinion.” No one can say what or where that bar is, whether its sentences are righteous, or who enforces them either way. We should feel that rulers are, in the truest sense, responsible to their subjects, because in a world governed by a righteous God everyone is responsible for his neighbour and to his neighbour. Such responsibility does not interfere with free, manly action: the courage that defies abuse for the sake of right, the will that commands, the strong hand that punishes disobedience. It does not, because there is always reference to One who knows all things and is not warped by partiality. What does interfere, as much with the government of rulers as with the freedom of subjects, with all the life of society and the manliness of individuals, is the sense of a vague, uncontrolled tyranny lodged in a man, a mob, a soldiery or a press. It follows no rule but its own caprice, claims the right to do as it likes, and declares itself the minister of nothing, though it becomes by turns the minister of everything most grovelling and base.

I do not for an instant deny the reality of that mysterious Opinion before which rulers and people are said to crouch, or its awfulness. It is awful to think that you and I help create this power, and that what kind of power it is depends in some measure, none can tell how great, on each of us. It receives some of the qualities of a spirit of grace or of perdition from the words we speak and the acts we do. But let those who confess this power, undeterred by its intangible, immaterial nature, ask themselves two things. Does it take any more credulity to acknowledge a living, personal Ruler over their doings and thoughts? And if they acknowledged Him habitually, might they not help change Opinion from a misshapen idol, its eyes downward and fixed on itself, into a form expressing all holy memories and glorious aspirations? Such a change can never come from a faith that speaks of God as having a reserved, ultimate dominion, entitled to a peppercorn rent in token of it. It will come whenever we say in full force that He is our King and that we are all His ministers.

II. But St. Paul says further, “He is a minister of God to thee.” A strange assertion! The Emperor might be a minister of God to the Roman world, however little he fulfilled his ministry. But how could he be a minister of God to some individual member of the Roman Church, who counted it the best privilege of his obscurity that the Emperor would never hear of him or inquire after him, and that he might live and die beyond the reach of his favours or his malice? In this way: the Emperor’s existence testified to the poor Christian that he belonged to the great Roman world and was concerned, whether citizen or slave, in its welfare and its misery. That was a great step in his moral and spiritual education. When he was taken into the Christian Church and claimed to be a member of Christ and a child of God, he took on affinities and obligations to Jew and Greek, barbarian and Scythian, bond and free. But he could easily forget them. He might fancy, and everything encouraged the fancy, that the Church was an isolated body and that those outside it belonged to a different race. The fact of a common civil ruler, brought before him as St. Paul brought it, deepened and widened the doctrine of his baptism and cleared away the confusions mixed with it. Nor was this benefit destroyed, or scarcely weakened, by the ruler’s character. If he was an oppressor, there was more need to fall back on the Source of his authority. In secret prayer to the One whose will is only for good, that His will be done on earth as in Heaven, one learns more than from all books about a government that is no less individual for being universal. It does not overlook the solitary penitent because it is occupied with the destinies of the Church in all nations, and it does not stop directing the planets because it attends to the young ravens when they cry. Is not the bitterest tyrant a minister of God to the man whom he enables to make these discoveries?

I take an extreme instance because St. Paul was writing with such instances in view, and I wish to show that his language bears the test. But I am far more anxious to assert his position for those rulers who confess their calling and try to fulfil it. How cold and hard it is to speak of them as ministering only to the body politic! So far as they contribute to its health and growth, make us feel it a living whole, show us that material prosperity is not what makes or keeps a nation, and teach us that we belong to the same race as those who spoke our tongue and fought our battles in other days, so far they must be ministers of God to each of us personally. Are they not quickening our hearts and hopes, strengthening our sense of immortality, helping burn out some of our frivolity and selfishness, and enabling us to enter more truly the Kingdom of God? Since man is made in God’s image, all true human rule must be like the Divine rule in this: it is most minute when it is most comprehensive, and calls for the most personal loyalty when it is most generally even and just.

III. The Apostle’s last words are implied in the ones I have just touched on, yet must not be passed over: “He is a minister of God to thee for good.” St. Paul writes this to men who might soon be lighting the city as torches to cover the guilt of the man who set it on fire. Was Nero not a minister of God for good to them, if he was the instrument of that torture? May we not say the same of every successful imitator of his, of Charles IX in France, of Philip II in the Netherlands? Were they not ministers of God for good to those whom they sent beyond the reach of their crimes, to cry beneath the altar for the day when the earth should no more conceal her blood or cover her slain? The Apostle could venture this daring sentiment. He knew that God would somehow prove it true, for that generation and all generations. And it will be known some day how many men the most hypocritical and accursed governments have served for good. They led them from trifling to earnestness, turned reckless plotters into self-denying patriots, and changed their atheism or devil-worship into a grounded faith in the God of Truth. I fear many such will rise up in judgment against those in happier circumstances, to whom the name of Freedom has become so ordinary that they jest at it as a schoolboy phrase, ask how much richer it has made them, or wish they could trade it for some of the conveniences of despotism. This nerveless, heartless, purposeless temper tends, as it grows, to the fulfilment of its own aspirations. Liberty cannot last when the desire for it has perished. Despotism is sure to come when it is beckoned for.

When it does come, brethren, one sad discovery will be forced on us. We may love tyranny, but we shall never love the tyrant. Loyalty, in England at least, will not be separated from reverence for Law. Affection for the person of a Sovereign, when strongest and most cordial, is inseparably intertwined with the belief that the Sovereign has obligations and confesses them. Affection for a person is quite another thing from affection for an institution, and twenty-one years ago we were in great danger of substituting the latter for the former. It has been one of the great blessings of a female reign that the chivalry which had by then suffered greatly from political theories has to some degree revived. Our thoughts about government have become more human and less mechanical, and we regard affections and attachments not as mere ornaments on the outside of the social edifice but as necessary to its compactness and stability. But this latent chivalry, a real and blessed counteraction to the evil tendencies I spoke of, could never have come forth for any Mary Stuart, however brilliant and attractive, who thought that household laws and national laws were not made for her. The opinion that Sovereigns, male or female, have some right, divine or human, against the nation they represent, or apart from it, is one England has shed her best blood to extinguish, and no sophistry can revive it among us.

But the direct opposite of this opinion, that the Sovereign is the minister of God to each of us for good, we should strive with all our might to realize and hold fast. If we ask how the Apostle could proclaim that principle in the heart of the Roman capital in its darkest age, I find no explanation but this. He believed Jesus Christ to be the Son of God and the King of men, so he could not help believing that all human society was organized according to the law Christ spoke, and embodied in His Incarnation and Death: “The Chief of all is the Servant of all.” He could not doubt that the head of the Roman legions and the ruler of the provinces was therefore a minister of God, and a minister for good, since that is the one end God seeks for His creatures if Christ’s revelation is true. He could not doubt that the Emperor, if he believed this, would be a blessing to the world, and that he was a curse because he thought the world was to minister to him and not he to it. He could not doubt that every Christian ought to maintain the truth Nero set at naught, and that if he did, it would prove itself in his case: Nero would be a minister of God for good to him.

And if we ask how the faith has worked its way into the heart of modern Europe that there is a constitution for nations, which kings, parliaments and charters assume and ratify but did not create, the answer, I think, is the same. When the Incarnation is denied and a Mediator between God and man is utterly rejected, you must have an absolute Caliph or Sultan, or a government carried on by mere officials. You cannot have the confession of a relationship between Sovereign and subjects, or a principle of relationship, interdependence and mutual obligation running through all ranks and orders. These are involved in the faith in a Son of God and a Son of Man, and are as strong or weak as that faith. Whatever has suffocated that faith undermines constitutional liberty, whether ecclesiastical pretension, revolt against that pretension, the worship of money, or the worship of a Tyrant instead of a Father. To bring that faith out in its fulness before nations that nominally confess it is to help them break their political fetters. We cannot dig so deep for the foundations of our own free institutions without helping bring all Englishmen within their circle and blessing. We cannot dig so deep for the foundations of European liberty without seeing that the most various forms of society may express a common truth lying beneath them. If priests, instead of setting at naught the civil order of nations, will show that a universal Church, with Christ at its centre, underlies those nations, quickens them, and preserves their distinctions and their unity, the laity will readily own them as ministers of God. And if, in our Queen’s reign, some cheering glimpse of the freedom with which Christ has made us free can be given to our own people, to our dependencies, and to the different tribes of the earth, how will ages to come exclaim, “Verily, she has been a minister of God to us for good”!