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Presbyterians who know their Covenanter history will remember what Andrew Melville once told King James I in 1596. His “Two-Kingdoms” speech was one for the ages, and it has resonated not only on the European side of the Atlantic, but also in America as well.
American Presbyterian Stuart Robinson had occasion once to utter Melville’s words to the chief magistrate in America, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln, after Lincoln’s military issued an order in 1864 to suppress Robinson’s magazine, the True Presbyterian, under charges inciting rebellion. He wrote a letter to President Lincoln in December 1864 from Toronto, Canada, where he was living in exile, requesting a reversal of “the monstrous order of General Burbidge, of November 19, 1864, for the suppression of the True Presbyterian, a purely ecclesiastical journal, published at Louisville, Kentucky.”
With no response, Stuart followed up with an open letter to the President dated January 26, 1865, in which he elaborated at great length upon the argument that his concern was not political rebellion to the present U.S. administration, but rather the cause of Christ. And in this letter he quoted Andrew Melville to make his point.
The civil government, represented to us, primarily, by the constitution and laws, and secondarily by your administration, so long as its acts in accord with the constitution and laws, is undoubtedly an ordinance of God. And therefore by Divine authority you wield the power of the sword to coerce obedience. But another government, in itself distinct and complete, to which government has been committed the “power of the keys,” as to the “power of the sword.” As Andrew Melville had occasion to remind a tyrant Stuart — “God’s two kingdoms, one the Kingdom of Jesus Christ whose subject James is, and of whose kingdom he is neither a king nor a lord but only a member and they whom Christ hath called to govern his spiritual kingdom have a sufficient authority which no Christian king should control or discharge;” so I may remind you that, there are two Presidents and Commonwealths in these United States; the one President Lincoln and the other President Jesus Christ, in whose Commonwealth President Lincoln hath no sort of official function. And I may say this with still more force than Andrew Melville, seeing that beside the Ordinance of Christ in his revealed statute book, the founders of the American civil Commonwealth have, for the first time in history, acknowledged by civil enactments, the independence of the Church, which King James denied. And therefore all utterances and acts, either on the civil or ecclesiastical side, by which the secular intrudes into the spiritual, or the spiritual into the secular sphere are violations of the civil constitution of the country as well as of the statutes of Christ.
Only three months later President Lincoln was laid to rest after being struck down by an assassin’s bullet, and Robinson was able to return to his beloved Louisville a year after that momentous event, in April 1866. For a minister known for his staunch advocacy of the spirituality of the church, it is remarkable how much trouble Robinson got into with civil authority. His conflict with the civil magistrate echoes not only the conflict which led Andrew Melville to speak as he did to King James, but also led Peter to say “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29). For a much more detailed account of this story, see Preston D. Graham, Jr., A Kingdom Not of This World: Stuart Robinson’s Struggle to Distinguish the Sacred From the Secular During the Civil War (2002).
