governors upon earth,' side by side with the duty of obedience to 'God's almighty and most excellent name'; and as it is God who has given the rulers their authority, he prays for grace to submit to them, and offers rich prayer for their welfare and that of the empire. And the spirit lived on in the Christian {123} church through all the persecutions, and the apologists for Christianity loved to protest their loyalty to the empire, and to think of their church as 'the soul of the world,' maintaining it by prayer and virtue in the midst of impiety and corruption. In England this passage has often been put to two conspicuously unjustifiable uses. First, it was the stronghold of the maintainers of 'the divine right of kings' and of 'passive obedience.' In reality it asserts the divine right of civil authority, but not of any particular kind of civil authority. Indeed the government of the empire was still nominally a republic in its fundamental forms, though it was becoming a despotism in fact. And supposing the senate and people had--as is of course conceivable--reasserted their authority over their 'emperors,' or military officers, the Christian doctrine of divine right would have afforded no guidance as to which of the claimants to authority had the divine will on its side. What is barely asserted is the divine right of the existing civil authority, democratic or regal. And while our passage exalts the normal duty of obedience, it suggests no answer to the question--Is there not a point where a government so manifestly fails to {124} maintain the divine order in the world, or to represent the will of God and the best interests of the people, that it deserves to be put an end to? At such a point Christianity can only serve to reinforce the natural instincts of justice and right.