It’s too early to be making endorsements in the Republican primaries, but we don’t mind saying we’re glad to see Vice President Pence enter the fray. We’ve been among his admirers even before he was tapped by Donald Trump to be his running mate in 2016. Yet it’s hard to think of any politician, at least in our time, who has been tested in respect of the constitutional oath in quite the way Mr. Pence has — or come out with more flying colors.

In that sense Mr. Pence has got the jump on everyone else in the race. He has been tested more intensely on his oath than any vice president we can think of, though there are some contenders. That is because of how the Hoosier handled the events leading up to and during January 6, 2021, when, with rioters calling for him to be put on the gallows, he refused to leave the Capitol. He stayed bent on his duty to, as the Constitution puts it, “open all the Certificates.”

Mr. Pence has written a deeply affecting account of this in his new memoir, “So Help Me God.” It’s a wonderful title, we have said on several occasions, and an extraordinary book. In it Mr. Pence recounts a harrowing conversation with President Trump at the White House on January 5. That’s when Mr. Pence informed the president that the Constitution doesn’t grant the vice president the powers to do what the president wanted.

Upon which, Mr. Pence writes, he then went back to his office. There he sat down. Then he looked around at the portraits, which included Vice Presidents Jefferson, Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, and Coolidge. They set Mr. Pence to thinking of the Book of Hebrews and the “cloud of witness,” observing everything we do, and the call to “throw off everything that hinders” and “let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”

Then the vice president bowed his head, folded his hands, and prayed — “yes,” these columns have noted, “right there on government property.”  Then, the next day — January 6 — Mr. Pence went to the Capitol and managed, despite all the pressure and tumult, to cleave to the Constitution in a display of courage that inspired his countrymen in both parties and that will be studied and talked about for years to come.

We don’t want to make too much of this, but it illuminates several points that Mr. Pence seemed to grasp instinctively. One is that in the American system the vice president is not a subordinate of the president. He is elected in his own right. He cannot be told what to do — not even to fetch a cup of coffee — by the president (or anyone else). He can’t be fired by the President. Technically, he’s not even in the executive branch but is president of the Senate.

Mr. Pence has often said, and with good reason, that he’s proud of the accomplishments, and there were many, of the Trump administration. Our own sense is that Mr. Trump himself would have been in a better position today were he to have accepted the advice Mr. Pence was trying to give him. History, though, doesn’t disclose her alternatives. She has disclosed that Mr. Pence is a man of extraordinary constitutional courage, which is at a premium.