Excerpt from Patience and Confidence the Strength of the Church: A Sermon Preached on the Fifth of November, Before the University of Oxford, at S. Mary's, and Published at the Wish of Many of Its Members Non-resistance and passive obedience, in the sense to which they are generally limited, are but two sides of the same doctrine, (the former speaking of it negatively, as not opposing force to force, the latter positively, as taking patiently whatever may be laid upon one, ) and, together, are only a particular application of a general principle. In religion, it is faith; under misfortune, it is resignation; under trial, it is patient waiting for the end amid provo cation, it is gentleness; amid afl'ronts, meekness; amid injuries, it is endurance; towards enemies, non-requital; towards railing, it is not answering again to parents, it is filial obedience; to superiors, respect; to authorities unquestioning submission; towards Civil Government, it is obedience upon principle, not only when it costs nothing, (as obedience to it ordinarily does not, and so can hardly be called the fulfilment of a duty, ) but when it costs some thing. On this, (as on almost every other subject of morals, ) our standard in this superficial age is for the most part lax and low; not simply (as of course it ever must be) in the selfish and profane, but in the current notions of the day. Maxims are received as indisputable, which betray a mixture of Heathenism with Christianity, and which proceed upon no principle even of heathen morality. As a warning against this, it has been wished, in the following Sermon, to point out how deeply the principle itself lies in Holy Scripture, how largely it extends, how it was acted upon by the Church, in her healthy state, and how God has uniformly blessed those who acted upon it, and has chastised those who abandoned it. But though the circumstances of the day required it to be illustrated by the events, for which that day is so memorable, and that the lesson of those events should be inculcated, it was not intended to consider the doctrine prominently in its poli tical bearings, much less to confine it to what politicians of these days would consider as such. For the temptations to offend against this law, in the extreme degree of rebel lion, are happily very rare, while yet the principle itself may be broken very frequently. Over-eagerness to have what is really wrong redressed, when we are the sufferers; taking matters into men's own hands; combinations to use a moral compulsion upon Governors to abrogate What is really oppressive - in short, a scheming, contriving activity of any sort, is, in itself, opposed to this principle, and likely to tend, more or less, to its overt breach. It is in the strong conviction that the enemies of the Church have no power to hurt her, any more than the lions whose mouths God had shut, While Daniel was in their den, to hurt His Prophet, but that those over-anxious for her, or who would help her by human contrivances, may injure her very seriously, that the warnings held out by God's dealings in such cases have been insisted on. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.