Page:The Conscience Clause (Oakley, 1866).djvu/70

58, at least as much so as respect for religious truth. It is, therefore a question not of subordinating principles to expedients, but of balancing principles; and that question is as old as the Gospel, as old as the world. Life is one long course of it. To complain of a Government for forcing the task upon us is to complain of the fate which governs human things. The Church has to do to-day what she has often had to do before, and will often have to do again; what, moreover, she has abundant maxims and precedents to guide her in doing. Were it not, as I have already argued, and as I firmly believe it to be, a case in which the Church is bound, on her own principles and for her own sake, to comply with the State's demand in this instance, it would yet come within the scope of those maxims of concession to the "powers that be" of which, and in not less important particulars, St. Paul's epistles are so full; it would still be open to settlement on the principles of the Divine Arbitrator who held the balance so evenly between conflicting claims (which these, I repeat, really are not), and who laid down that inexhaustible law of Church and State which, as I shall no doubt be told, can still be quoted on both sides—"Render unto Caesar the things that are Cæsar's, and unto God the things that are God's."

IV. I have now Set forth the history of the Conscience Clause, and have attempted to deal with the two principal assaults upon it, which have been concerned respectively with its terms and its effect. In so doing, I have had occasion, as I foresaw, to discuss incidentally most of the points of principle involved in it. There remain, however, one or two arguments arising from a consideration of the office of a National Church,