The Ministry of Sovereigns

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

We the Clergy call ourselves Ministers. You grant us this title, even if you refuse us others which we are wont to assume. It sounds a humble one; it seems only to say that we renounce all right to be masters. Still it has produced in other days, it does sometimes produce in ours, an effect the very reverse of this upon clergymen as well as laymen. Any exclusive claim, be it to the meanest office in the world, may puff up him who makes it with a certain sense of consequence, which is felt to be the more monstrous by others, because it stands in such strong contrast with the thing which is claimed. I suppose the arrogant strikes many as greater, not less, when the ellipsis is supplied, when we say, as St. Paul says, “We are ministers of God.” And yet it is dangerous to leave the question open, whether we mean this or something quite different from this. Every one who holds our office knows well that, in some sense or other, he must be a Minister. He must be the servant of his own tastes, notions, imaginary interests. Or he must be the servant of the tastes, notions, imaginary interests of those among whom he works. Or he must, at whatever hazard, with whatever conscious danger of putting forward a pretension which may exalt him in his own eyes, or may win for him a superstitious reverence, or may expose him to ridicule by his failure in supporting it, boldly say, “I am the minister of God; my commission is from Him.” But when we have ventured on this language, believing it to be true, we have not gained much. The name is awful, but it is familiar. It suggests to most a certain round of duties, which they expect a certain set of persons to perform. A few, to whom history has taught its possible significance, may be offended at it. They may hint that the Servus Servorum set his foot on the neck of kings; that to set their feet on the necks of the people in different lands was the function of those who wore the same livery. But for one who cherishes these fears there will be nine who think the phrase a mere innocent fiction. There will be scarcely an hour in the day in which each of us is not tempted to think the same.

What escape is there from these opposite dangers, continually succeeding each other, of ecclesiastical pretension and ecclesiastical impotence? I know none but this: that we should resolutely adhere to the name which something higher than law or custom originally bestowed upon us, but which these have ratified; and that then we should as resolutely affirm in the ears of all men, that our name is a sign to them as well as to us; that we are called Ministers of God to the intent that they may be reminded what they are; that it is a sin in them as it is in us to assume any position or dignity below this. There is no fear, if we pursue this course honestly, that we shall pass for more than we are worth upon the strength of a name; or that the name shall be set at naught by the boast which accompanies it; or that it should be reckoned merely as one of those safe and harmless lies which the world believes it may indulge in. The word will again carry with it, as every word should, both healing power and a sting.

I. In the chapter from which my text is taken, St. Paul speaks of civil rulers as ministers of God. He does not limit or soften his language to suit the circumstances of his own time. He does not say, “Emperors and kings ought to be ministers of God. It would be very well if they would consent to be so.” He says boldly and simply, “They are ministers of God.” It is not in their pleasure not to be so. They must be so, if they dislike the necessity ever so much, if they rebel against it ever so fiercely. Nero’s will might be devilish; every power which he wielded was Divine. Not one energy, physical or intellectual, which he abused had come from an evil source; not one was his own. He had been appointed to rule the world which he tormented, by Him Who loved that world. He was the steward of His treasures, if he spent them in making those miserable whom they were intended to bless.

How would such a doctrine as this affect the Christians of the Roman Church? Would it lead them to look with more slavish fear and reverence upon those who wore the trappings of power? Would it lead them to regard with less of horror and indignation those who were turning power to the destruction of their fellow-men? They could not confound vital power with those outside accidents of it which our vulgar nature prompts us to admire and envy, when they recollected from Whom it came; when they remembered what that Power was, which called the earth and the heavens into being, and renewed them every morning. They must hate every cruel and wanton exercise of power when they thought with themselves, “The royalty of kings and emperors is but the reflection of the royalty which He manifested in its fulness, Who healed the sick, cast out devils, went about doing good.” The effect of regarding Nero as a minister of God, will, no doubt, have been to make them patient under his government, so far as it affected themselves,—afraid to engage in any mad schemes for subverting it. But this faith will have given strength to their cries that the earth might be delivered from all her oppressors. It will have assured them that those cries would not be in vain. It will have made them welcome their own sufferings as steps towards the Redemption.

Those who attempt the hard task of finding apologies for tyranny in Scripture, sometimes ask triumphantly, “If Nero’s power, according to St. Paul, was ordained by God, what subjects can pretend that the powers which are over them have some lower origin?” I answer, “Certainly none.” And subjects would be most unwise if they wished that their cases should be an exception from the Apostle’s rule, if they did not insist that they should be brought within the range of that rule. For what does it import? That every power is a trust. That every power implies responsibility by its very nature. That this responsibility is not to some imaginary judge who will not call the wrong-doer to account, but to a real Judge Who is 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 which visited Nero that night when he knew himself to be his mother’s murderer, was a message to him, “Thou art God’s minister, and thou hast used His sword against thy own flesh and blood.” The assassin by whom he fell at last was saying, “Thou art God’s minister; and so am I, guilty like thyself, but ordained to call thee to His Judgment-seat, that thou mayest declare what thou hast done with the millions which He has committed to thee.”

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

I do not mean for an instant to deny the reality of that mysterious Opinion, before which, it is said, that rulers as well as people must crouch. I do not deny its awfulness. It is very awful to think that you and I are contributing to create this power; that it depends in some measure—none can tell in how great a measure—upon each of us, of what kind that power shall be. Some of the qualities of a spirit of grace or of a spirit of perdition it is receiving from the words we speak and the acts we do. But let those who confess this power, who are not hindered from confessing it by its intangible immaterial nature, ask themselves whether it requires any more credulity to acknowledge the presence of a living, personal Ruler over their doings and their thoughts, and whether, if they made that acknowledgment habitually, they might not help to change Opinion, from a misshapen idol, with its eyes downwards and fixed upon itself, into a form expressing all holy memories and glorious aspirations. Such a change can never, indeed, come from that sort of faith which speaks of God as possessing a reserved, ultimate dominion,—as entitled to a peppercorn rent in token of that dominion. It will take place whenever, in the full force of the words, we say 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! A minister of God to the Roman world the Emperor might be, however little he fulfilled his ministry. But a minister of God to some individual member of the Roman Church, who must have counted it the best privilege of his obscurity that the Emperor would never hear of him, never inquire after him,—that he might live and die out of the reach of his favours or his malice,—how could he be a minister of God to that man? In this way: his existence was a testimony to the poor Christian that he belonged to the great Roman world, that he was concerned, whether he was a citizen or slave, in its welfare and its misery. That was a great step in his education, in his moral and spiritual education. When he was taken into the Christian Church, when he claimed to be a member of Christ and a child of God, he contracted affinities and obligations to Jew and Greek, barbarian and Scythian, bond and free. But he might easily forget these affinities and obligations. He might fancy—there was everything to encourage the fancy—that the Church was an isolated body,—that those who lay beyond it belonged to a different race. The fact of being under a common civil ruler, when brought before him as St. Paul brought it before him, deepened and expanded the doctrine of his baptism, and removed the confusions which mingled with it. Nor was the benefit destroyed, scarcely weakened, by the character of the ruler. If he was an oppressor, there was more necessity of falling back on the Source from which his authority proceeded. In secret prayers to Him Whose will is to good and only to good, that His will might be done on earth as it is in Heaven, how much more is learnt than from all books, concerning that government which is not less individual because it is universal, which does not overlook the solitary penitent because it is occupied with the destinies of the Church in all tribes and nations, which does not cease to direct the revolutions of 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 wonderful discoveries?

I take an extreme instance, for St. Paul was writing in the sight of such instances, and I wish to show that his language will bear the test. But I am far more desirous to assert the truth of his position in reference to 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,—so far as they make us feel it to be a living whole,—so far as they show us that material prosperity is not that which constitutes or preserves a nation,—so far as they teach us that we belong to the same race with those who spoke our tongue and fought our battles in other days,—so far they must be ministers of God to each one of us personally. For are they not quickening our hearts and hopes; are they not making our sense of immortality stronger; are they not helping to burn out some of our frivolity and selfishness; are they not enabling us to enter more truly the Kingdom of God? It is impossible, since man is made in the image of God, that all true human rule should not be like the Divine rule in this, that it is most minute when it is most comprehensive; that it calls for the most personal loyalty when it is most generally even and just.

III. The last words of the Apostle are implied in those to which I have just alluded,—implied in the first,—yet they must not be passed over: “He is a minister of God to thee for good.” St. Paul writes this to men who might, in a short time, be lighting the city as torches to cover the guilt of him who set it on fire. Well! and was not he a minister of God to them for good if he was the instrument of inflicting 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 the daring sentiment. He knew that by some means God would prove it to be true, for that generation and for all generations. And it will be known, some day, to how many men, governments the most hypocritical and accursed have been ministers of good, by leading them from trifling to earnestness, by changing them from reckless plotters into self-denying patriots, by turning their atheism or devil-worship into a grounded faith in the God of Truth. Many such, I fear, will rise up in judgment against those who live in happier circumstances, to whom the name of Freedom has become so much a name of course that they jest at it as a schoolboy phrase, or ask how much they are the richer for it, or wish they could barter it for some of the conveniences of despotism. This nerveless, heartless, purposeless temper, as it grows upon us, tends 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.

Whenever it does come, brethren, one sad discovery will be forced upon us. We may love tyranny, but we shall never love the tyrant. Loyalty, in England at least, will not be separated from the reverence for Law. We shall find that affection for the person of a Sovereign, when it is strongest and most cordial, is inseparably intertwined with the belief that the Sovereign has obligations, and confesses them. Affection for a person is indeed another thing altogether from affection for an institution. Twenty-one years ago we were in great danger of substituting the last for the first. It has been one of the great blessings of a female reign that the chivalry which had at that time suffered very greatly from political theories has in some degree been revived; that our thoughts about government have become more human and less mechanical; that 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, which has proved a real and blessed counteraction to those evil tendencies I spoke of just now, could never have come forth at the bidding of any Mary Stuart, however brilliant and attractive, who thought that household laws and national laws were not made for her. The opinion which treats Sovereigns, male or female, as having some right, divine or human, against the nation which they represent, or apart from it, has been one which England has shed her best blood to extinguish, and which no sophistry can revive amongst us.

But the opinion which is the direct opposite of this, that the Sovereign is the minister of God to each of us for good,—this, I think, we should strive with all our might to realize and hold fast. We inquire how the Apostle was enabled to proclaim that principle in the heart of the Roman capital, in its darkest age. We shall find no explanation but this: that as he believed Jesus Christ to be the Son of God and the King of men, he could not help believing that all human society was organized according to the law which He expressed in words, which He embodied in His Incarnation and His Death, “The Chief of all is the Servant of all.” He could not doubt that the head of the Roman legions, the ruler of the Roman provinces, was therefore a minister of God,—a minister therefore for good, since that is the one end, if Christ’s revelation is true, which God seeks for His creatures. He could not doubt that if the Emperor believed this he would be a blessing to the world; that he was a curse to it 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 which 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 inquire how the faith that there is a constitution for nations, which kings, parliaments, charters, assume and ratify, but which they did not create, has wrought itself into the heart of modern Europe the answer, I think, is the same. When the Incarnation is denied,—when a Mediator between God and man is utterly rejected—you must have an absolute Caliph or Sultan; you must have a government carried on by mere officials; you cannot have the confession of a relationship between the Sovereign and his subjects; you cannot have a principle of relationship, interdependence, mutual obligation, penetrating all ranks and orders. These are involved in the faith of a Son of God and a Son of Man; these are strong as that is strong, weak as that is weak. Whatever has suffocated that faith,—be it ecclesiastical pretension, be it the revolt against that pretension, be it the worship of money, be it the worship of a Tyrant instead of a Father—undermines constitutional liberty. To bring forth that faith in its fulness before the nations which nominally confess it, is to help them in breaking their political fetters. We cannot dig so deep for the foundations of our own free institutions without assisting to bring all Englishmen within the circle and blessing of them. We cannot dig so deep for the foundations of European liberty without perceiving that the most various forms of society may express a common truth which is lying beneath them. If priests, instead of setting at naught the civil order of nations, will show that a universal Church, of which Christ is the centre, underlies them, quickens them, preserves their distinctions and their unity, the laity will readily own them as ministers of God. If, in the reign of our Queen, some cheering glimpse of that freedom with which Christ has made us free, may be imparted to our own people, to our dependencies, 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”!