One of the strangest and yet most logical results of the Christian teachings and practice (and one which has been, for very sufficient reasons, ignored by the theologians) was to develop a radical and uncompromising spirit of democracy throughout the Christian communities or churches. The early Christians uniformly held that they, as Christians, belonged to a kingdom which was in, but not of, the world--a kingdom for which no earthly potentate had right or power to legislate; and this living faith loosened the bond of allegiance and dissolved the sense of obligation as to all human authority, and was the negation of the lawfulness of temporal government over the subjects of the kingdom for which they recognized no king but Christ. While, for the sake of peace, they were willing to render unto Cæsar the things which are Cæsar’s, by paying taxes to that government under which they lived, and by even yielding ready obedience to all laws and customs which did not come in conflict with the higher law of the kingdom, the rights of conscience, they universally regarded these laws as extraneous to their own organization, foreign statutes, imposed upon them from without; and, being solicitous to render unto God the things which are God’s, they steadily abstained from any participation in the affairs of government, and quietly assumed the right to judge for themselves whether any law, regulation, or custom, prescribed by the sovereign power, or other human authority, was or was not such as they might conscientiously obey. And, while they would no more have thought of holding office under pagan rulers or of participating in their legislation and government than they would have thought of accepting the priesthood of a heathen temple and participating in its idolatrous worship, they obeyed all laws alike, except such as conflicted with conscience, and these they refused to obey in the very face of persecutions, torture, and death. But this fearless assertion of the rights of conscience necessarily involved the right to sit in judgment upon all human laws and the powers that ordained them, and to determine for themselves whether the law was lawful. That helpless spirit of blind obedience to the decrees of despotic governments which characterized the pagan peoples was, therefore, impossible to the Christians. In the very teeth of universally established law and custom, they steadily refused to bear arms, to own slaves, to seek any legal redress in civil courts, to follow the law of their domicile in regard to the ownership of property or the succession to estates of the deceased, just as they refused to sacrifice to the gods, or to call any man master. Under the same lofty conception of the rights of conscience, in lands where women were bought and sold like cattle, they refused to practice polygamy; and in lands where female chastity was unknown and plural wives and concubines were