‘Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is
no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.…
Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is
due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom
honour.’—ROM. xiii. 1, 7.
It is impossible, I think, to read the Epistles of the New Testament
with any degree of attention, and not to see how anxious the writers
are that the Christianity which they preach should not be regarded as
a revolutionary and explosive force, upsetting and destroying existing
institutions, social and political; how concerned they are that their
converts should give no offence (beyond what was involved in the fact of
their religion) to the heathen neighbours among whom they lived; that
they should ‘Walk in wisdom toward them that are without[949],’ and have
their ‘conversation honest among the Gentiles[950]’; how careful they are
to say no word which should disturb the existing relations of slaves and
masters, of wives and husbands, of subjects and sovereigns; even though
the sovereign, the husband, the master might be heathen, and the slave,
the wife, the subject might be Christian. If there must be a breach, let
it come from the heathen member of the bond. The rule for the Christian
was: ‘let him not depart[951].’
And, in thus writing, the Apostles were but following out the teaching
and example of our Lord Himself. When He compares the kingdom of Heaven
to leaven[952], He means, I suppose, that the working of His doctrine
was to be, as a rule, gradual and assimilative, not sudden and explosive.
And He Himself always refused to assume the part of a political agitator,
or even of a social reformer, which His followers sometimes wished to
thrust upon Him. ‘He withdrew Himself,’ when the multitudes threatened to
‘take Him by force, to make Him a king[953]’; He would not be ‘a judge
or a divider’ in matters of inheritance[954]. All social and political
problems He left men to work out for themselves with the powers which
God has given them, under the guidance and control of God’s ordinary
providence; and to apply for themselves to the solution of these problems
the principles of His teaching, under the ordinary operations of the
Holy Spirit. And this refusal to interfere with the normal development
of human society emphasises all the more, as has been remarked[955]. His
uncompromising vindication of the law of marriage, as the one social
institution the sanctity of which is above all human laws: ‘God made them
male and female[956].’
He would not agitate against the tribute[957]; though the refusal
probably cost Him the popularity which had manifested itself so noisily
in the triumphal entry. And, in His trial before Pilate, He distinctly
recognised the Roman provincial government of Judaea, heathen and foreign
though it was, as being divinely ordered: ‘Thou couldest have no power at
all against me, except it were given thee from above[958].’
When the publicists of the middle ages, with Dante at their head, laid
stress on the birth and death of Christ under the Roman Empire as giving
a divine authority to that Empire, and to the mediaeval Empire which
claimed to be its successor[959], they were but carrying to somewhat
fanciful extremes an argument based upon undoubted facts.
And so St. Paul, in the passage which I have taken for my text, claims no
less than a divine sanction for the civil power: ‘The powers that be are
ordained of God.… Render therefore to all their dues.’ And the magnitude
of the claim is enhanced, if we remember that this was written, not
under any of the better Roman emperors; not under Trajan, whose virtues
so touched the heart of the Middle Ages, that they represented his soul
as transferred to Paradise through the intercession of St. Gregory, the
apostle of the English[960]; not under a philosophic saint like Marcus
Aurelius; but, probably, under the vain and vicious Nero.
If then such was the claim on the duty of subjects then, how much greater
the claim on us, who, for more than sixty years, have lived under one of
the very best of Christian sovereigns.
We can most of us remember the kind of thought and speech which was
prevalent not so many years ago. It was a common impression then that the
part to be played by the institution of Royalty in the future history of
the world was a very slight one. The growth of popular power, the spread
of education, and other causes, would reduce it to be nothing more than
the veil, and a very transparent veil, of a Democracy.
The history of the last quarter of a century has signally falsified
this forecast; and the present state of Europe gives it an emphatic
contradiction. At the present moment the question of war or peace, that
is for thousands, if not millions, the question of life or death, hangs
upon the fiat of some four or five men.
Nor is the view of the insignificance of Royalty borne out by the history
of England as a whole.
The story of English Royalty reaches back some fourteen hundred years. In
519, according to the traditional account, Certic and Cynric assumed the
kingship of the West Saxons; and the reflexion of the compiler of the
Saxon Chronicle, writing probably under Alfred, that ‘the royal house of
the West Saxons has ruled ever since that day,’ has, with the exception
of the Norman period, remained almost literally true down to the present
time. For it was Wessex which grew into England; and the first idea of
union, loosely and imperfectly realised under Egbert, was gradually
wrought out in many years of suffering. Alfred saved England from the
Danes, though at a tremendous sacrifice, and holds in real history the
place which romance assigns to Arthur; a Christian king,
‘Scarce other than my own ideal knight,’
who rolls back the tide of heathen conquest from his native land. We call
him, and we call him rightly, ‘Alfred the Great.’ But in days nearer
his own he was known as ‘England’s Darling.’ Will not the historian of
the future see a certain sad appropriateness in the fact that the Queen
should have died in the year which is to celebrate the millenary of the
death of this, the greatest of her ancestors, the one whom she so much
resembled in her unswerving loyalty to duty, her constant labour for
the good of her people, her unfaltering allegiance to truth? ‘The most
thoughtful provider for the widow, the defenceless, the orphan, and the
poor, … most beloved by his people,’ says Florence of Alfred. Asser calls
him ‘Alfred the truth-teller’; and we all remember how the great tribune
of the people, as he was sometimes called, declared that the Queen was
the most truthful person he had ever known.
So too after the fierce suffering of the Norman Conquest, it was Henry
II who knit the framework of the country together by an administrative
system, under the forms of which we, to a large extent, still live;
while Edward I, taking up the idea, which Simon de Montfort seemed to
have lighted upon almost by accident, made popular representation the
permanent basis of our constitution, on the express ground that ‘what
touches all, should be approved by all.’
Once more, in the religious crisis of the sixteenth century, Henry VIII
and Elizabeth, whatever their shortcomings, did much to impress upon the
English Church that sane and sober character of a via media, which, in
spite of extremists on either side, it has kept ever since.
We do not, at this stage of our national history, expect services
quite of this kind from the Crown. And yet the services which it has
rendered during the late reign have been simply immense. To take only
two of the most obvious; two, on which the late Mr. Bagehot was fond of
dwelling:—(1) It has been the symbol and sign of our unity, not only
as a nation, but as an empire. In every quarter of the globe, millions
upon millions of her subjects, who knew little or nothing of the nature
of Parliaments, of the theory of constitutional government, of the
responsibility of ministers, of the rise and fall of parties, looked up
to the Queen as the bond of union between them, the mother and head of a
vast family dispersed throughout the whole world; and this feeling had
been deepened and strengthened to an extraordinary degree by the events
of the last fifteen months.
(2) And closely connected with this is the second point. The experience
of more than three-and-sixty years has taught us to look up to the Crown
as the head of our home and family life. This has not always, indeed has
not often been the case, in English, or in any other history. The feeling
in our own case has owed something to the homely virtues of King George
III, but almost everything to the unfailing love and sympathy of the
Queen. In joy and sorrow, the humblest of her subjects might feel that
they had a share in her sympathy and care. And this sympathy was not of
that easy kind which stoops from painless heights to look upon the woes
of others, but had been won through depths of suffering and sorrow; and
the comfort which she gave to others was, in the Apostle’s words, ‘the
comfort wherewith’ she herself had been ‘comforted of God[961].’
Perhaps it is these two elements which come out most strongly in the
universal grief called forth by the heavy blow which has fallen upon us.
We have lost our mother, the head of our vast family; and we go forth,
like orphans in the night, to meet the unknown trials of a new century,
without the guidance of that wisely moderating hand, without the sympathy
of that feeling heart, to which we had learned to turn with a habit which
had become an instinct.
‘Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due;
… fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.’ May we not add, what was
hardly possible in the then circumstances of the Roman world, ‘love to
whom love’?
‘I exhort therefore,’ says the Apostle in another place, ‘that, first
of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be
made for all men; for kings, and for all that are in authority; that we
may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and honesty[962].’
Surely we have need, at the present time, to obey this exhortation.
‘Supplications, prayers, intercessions,’ shall we not offer these for our
new ruler and all his subjects? One of the earliest Christian prayers
which has come down to us is a prayer for rulers in the Epistle of St.
Clement of Rome[963]:—‘Do Thou, Lord, direct their counsel, according to
that which is good and well-pleasing in Thy sight; that, administering
in peace and gentleness, with godliness, the power which Thou hast given
them, they may obtain Thy favour.’ Eighteen centuries have not made that
prayer obsolete, or unnecessary. If there is much that is hopeful and
encouraging in the opening of the new era, there is also not a little to
cause anxiety even to the most buoyant; and problems have to be faced,
which may affect not merely the well-being, but the very existence of our
Church and Empire.
‘And giving of thanks.’ Shall we not render that too? Shall we not thank
God that for more than three-and-sixty years He gave us such a Queen?
I dare say many of us read with absorbing interest those extracts,
covering the past century, which the _Times_ reprinted from its own
columns at the end of the year. But, among all those extracts, there
was nothing, I think, more interesting than to read the proclamation
issued by the Queen at her accession, three-and-sixty years before, and
to note how exactly her hopes and promises were fulfilled. It is one of
the sternest tests which can be applied to a life of any length. To most
of us, if confronted in middle or declining years with the hopes and
resolutions of our youth, would they not sound more like sarcasms than
like prophecies?
Lastly, let us remember, that every great life, and every great example
which is lived before us, brings with it a corresponding weight of
obligation and responsibility. Let us pray with St. Ignatius that it may
not turn to a witness against ourselves: εὔχομαι ἵνα μὴ εἰς μαρτύριον
αὐτὸ κτήσωνται[964].