The powers which the Apostle, in the text most familiar to the Anglican divines of that age, pronounces to be ordained of God, are not the powers that can be traced back to a legitimate origin, but the powers that be.

When Jesus was asked whether the chosen people might lawfully give tribute to Caesar, he replied by asking the questioners, not whether Caesar could make out a pedigree derived from the old royal house of Judah, but whether the coin which they scrupled to pay into Caesar's treasury came from Caesar's mint, in other words, whether Caesar actually possessed the authority and performed the functions of a ruler.
It is generally held, with much appearance of reason, that the most trustworthy comment on the text of the Gospels and Epistles is to be found in the practice of the primitive Christians, when that practice can be satisfactorily ascertained; and it so happened that the times during which the Church is universally acknowledged to have been in the highest state of purity were times of frequent and violent political change.

One at least of the Apostles appears to have lived to see four Emperors pulled down in little more than a year.

Of the martyrs of the third century a great proportion must have been able to remember ten or twelve revolutions.

Those martyrs must have had occasion often to consider what was their duty towards a prince just raised to power by a successful insurrection.