Page:St. Paul's behaviour towards the civil magistrate.pdf/4

, and judges, before whom he had occasion to appear. And,

I. In the chapter now before us, the chief captain, who appears to have acted the part of a civil magistrate as well as of a commanding officer in Jerusalem, resolving to find out what it was that had so much incensed the whole multitude against: St. Paul, commanded him to be scourged, in order to his own confession of his crime. St. Paul could have borne this usage with as great Christian patience, and Roman fortitude, as any man living: and no man knew the true glory of suffering wrongfully better than he. But instead of this, he seems to think it a much more becoming part to insist upon those civil privileges which the laws of the state entitled him to, as he was free of the city of Rome. Is it lawful for you to scourge a man that is a Roman, and uncondemned? was the question which he thought fit at this time to ask. If a certain set of notions had been embraced in those days, some of his fellow-christians might perhaps have informed him that the laws were but a dead letter; that what the executive power ordained was law, though contrary to all the laws then in force; that he who was but a subject was no proper judge of his own rights, and ought not to give so ill a precedent to other subjects as might encourage them to