212 PROF. F. F. ROGET, ON FEEDERIC GODET^ SWISS DIVINE, 



not clone by weak melting into tears and unfruitful supplica- 

 tion. A blissful contemplation of the perfections of the 

 Divinity does not do it either. There is no other way than 

 working out one's own redemption in a downright way, by the 

 sweat of one's brow, as Godet puts it somewhat tersely. Godet 

 became more and more wedded to that conception. 



In the same year, 1840, A. L. Bonnet, the Huguenot Minister 

 at Frankfort, wished for his help in preparing certain com- 

 mentaries to be attached to an edition of the New Testament 

 intended for use in France. Godet resisted. " Should we not," 

 he said, " be then thrusting the smallness of us poor little men 

 between the Word of God and the reader ? Is it not as though 

 we would say : ' Look here, reader, my friend, you are about 

 to read Chapter No. so and so. Well, mind you find in it this 

 or that, nothing else, nothing more. We are there to tell 

 you what.' " 



Godet was a magnificent temporiser and it was a matter of 

 self-respect with his soul not to usurp the prerogatives of its 

 Master. He looked upon the Osterwald Catechism, in use at 

 Neuchatel, as pernicious. He could not admit that authority 

 should pose as being infallible. When, exasperated by the 

 ■slowness of his sometimes dreamy pupil, his vivacity and keen 

 sense of duty got the better of his patience, he knew how to 

 ■apologise for his own errors in judgment. 



Upon the problem of the reciprocal positions of Church and 

 State he began to form his views in 1842. Seldom was a man 

 so well served in this respect by contemporary history in his 

 native land. 



The Church in the Principality — later the Eepublic — of 

 ISTeuchatel exemplified varied phases of association with the 

 State, and also various degrees of dissociation. Godet would 

 not hear of a separation of Church and State, because such a 

 separation is inconceivable in the government of the world by 

 God, which either is a Christian government or is no govern- 

 ment at all. His doctrine was that the powers that be are 

 from God and that the form of government is an immaterial 

 aspect of principality, but principality there must he. The 

 power exercising sovereignty has a right, a duty even, to exact 

 obedience to principality. Principality being from God, no 

 wrong that is done can be ascribed to principality, but the 

 responsibility for the wrong must be looked for in man's 

 general imperfection. 



So our friend Godet, with his insight into the imperfection of 

 governors, pleaded early the independence of the Church. In 



