Million Book Collection - The Fishers of Men Ministries

RECONSTRUCTING THE NATURAL ORDER 405cross of Calvary. As often as the Apostles and theirsuccessors had to say, " It is better to obey God thanman," and to suffer for so saying, they were introducinga new principle into human government;they were limiting the State's supremacy by theforce of the human conscience. And thus in factcivil liberty was contained in the bosom of religiousliberty, and this was the cause which was being contendedfor from Claudius to Constantine. Hence avast store of lessons for all future time is laid upin this period. One of these is that in it the battleof human liberty, as against the arbitrary and unlimitedpower of the civil government, was then won.Every Christian teacher who was occupied in thepromulgation of doctrine, who was a member of theChristian hierarchy, who administered the sacraments,who offered the Sacrifice, all of them " things of God,"to which our Lord referred, every confessor who sufferedfor these things, every martyr who died for them, wasa witness for the freedom of the human conscience inthe face of the civil authority. By the same act he waalso establishing civil liberty ; he was setting a morabound to the State's authority, which left room for thexercise of every lawful right by the individual.This vast result had been definitely gained not fothe Roman Empire only but for all time, and under a'governments, when Constantine accepted the Christia:Faith, and as emperor, the possessor of all the rights ohe State, the Senatus Populusque Rom anus, acknowdged the independent authority of the ChurchhLet us then observe a mighty contrast in Ron-history. When Peter in the second year of Claudcame to Rome, an unacknowledged stranger of a m