Excerpt from God and Our Country: A Discourse Delivered in the First Congregational Church in Roxbury, on Fast Day, April 8, 1847 These are the Words of Jesus. The Pharisees were trying to entangle him in a dilemma which they thought he could not escape. They ask him Whether it is right or wrong for them, Jews, to pay tribute to the Roman emperor. The difficulty of the question lay here. The Jews had been conquered, and were held as a Roman province by force of arms. If he said, without qualification, that it was right to pay the tribute, and so acknowledged the rightful su premacy of the emperor, they knew he would expose himself to the indignation of the Jewish people, who held it as one of the most sacred ideas of their reli gions and civil polity, that no sovereign but God should be recognized, or a man of their own race, Whom God should designate and anoint. On the other hand, if he said it was wrong to pay the trib ute, they could go at once to the Roman magistrate and accuse him of seditious words, and so destroy him. The snare was well laid. An ultraist would have been caught in it. But Jesus was no ultraist. They could not drive him into ultraism in matters connected with civil government, social order, and God's prov idence. He calls for a piece of coin, gets the conces sion of his questioners that it bore Caesar's image and superscription, and then gives the answer of the text, in which he recognizes the authority and claims of the emperor, in such a manner that he could not be accused of being other than a peaceable subject, and yet with such restrictions in behalf of the divine law that he could not be charged with giving up the prin ciples of piety and morality. 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.