Page:Essay on the First Principles of Government 2nd Ed.djvu/182

nature. If, therefore, any private christian should differ in opinion from his civil magistrate, or those invested by him with civil power, with respect to those things which are of a religious nature, he cannot consider himself as under any more obligation to submit to him, than he would be to submit to a heathen magistrate in the same case. A conscientious christian will never hesitate about obeying God rather than man, though that man should be a magistrate, or though he should be a christian, and assume the title of supreme head of the whole, or any part of the christian church. Any other maxims than these, it is evident, might be attended with the utter subversion of the christian religion. For the civil magistrate would have nothing to do but to adopt christianity into his system of civil policy; and then, having the whole within his own cognizance, he might add and alter at pleasure, till he had made it quite a different thing from what he found it.