These are disobedient men. He is an
anarchist in practice, who meditates treason and rebellion against the
"powers that be" actually over him in the State wherein he lives. To
obey no actual power is to obey no power, as to wear no actual clothes
is to go naked. To keep up the comparison,--as a man may change his
clothes upon occasion, and thus go through a brief interval of
unclothedness without injury to health or violation of decency,
notwithstanding the requirement of nature to wear clothes: so it may
be or it may not be consonant with the exigency of our nature at times
to subvert by insurrection the existing government in order to the
substitution of a new authority; that does not concern us here. We are
stating the general rule under ordinary circumstances. The submission
to civil authority, which nature requires of us, must be paid in the
coin of obedience to the actual established "powers that be."
13. Any one who understands how morality comes from God (_Ethics_, c.
vi., s. ii. nn. 6-9, 13, pp. 119-125), can have no difficulty in
seeing how civil power is of God also. The one point covers the other.
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