utterances of his is remarkable. Warm-hearted impulsiveness, often
wrong-headed and sometimes illogical, had been their mark; but here
we have calm, fixed determination, which, as is usually its manner,
wastes no words, but in its very brevity impresses the hearers as
being immovable. Whence did this man get the power to lay down once
for all the foundation principles of the limits of civil obedience,
and of the duty of Christian confession? His words take rank with the
ever-memorable sayings of thinkers and heroes, from Socrates in his
prison telling the Athenians that he loved them, but that he must
'obey God rather than you,' to Luther at Worms with his 'It is
neither safe nor right to do anything against conscience. Here I
stand; I can do nothing else. God help me! Amen.' Peter's words are
the first of a long series.

This first instance of persecution is made the occasion for the clear
expression of the great principles which are to guide the Church. The
answer falls into two parts, in the first of which the limits of
obedience to civil authority are laid down in a perfectly general
form to which even the Council are expected to assent, and in the
second an irresistible compulsion to speak is boldly alleged as
driving the two Apostles to a flat refusal to obey.

It was a daring stroke to appeal to the Council for an endorsement of
the principle in verse 19, but the appeal was unanswerable; for this
tribunal had no other ostensible reason for existence than to enforce
obedience to the law of God, and to Peter's dilemma only one reply
was possible. But it rested on a bold assumption, which was
calculated to irritate the court; namely, that there was a blank
contradiction between their commands and God's, so that to obey the
one was to disobey the other. When that parting of the ways is