retic basis to the leaders of the English Revolution; and how, again, the same thought, learned from Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau, animated the American Revolution. We must not turn aside, however, to follow this notion of natural law through the tangled web of jurisprudence, theories of the state, and practical politics. Our purpose here is to trace, in the briefest possible outline, the notion of law in the principal systems of ethics, to show the typical forms in which this notion has appeared and its place in these systems.
In the Middle Ages morals and religion, ethics and theology, were inextricably confounded. It is, therefore, in the works of the Christian theologians that we must look for a continuation of the stream of ethical thought in this period. Remembering the stern denunciation which the founder of Christianity pronounced against the legalism of the Scribes and Pharisees, and his constant insistence upon 'inwardness'—i.e., a rectitude of heart and spirit and a positive good-will (ἡἀγάπη)—we might expect to find the notion of law playing but a small part in Christian ethics. Three influences, however, may be mentioned, whose combined effect was to give a decidedly jural form to the moral teachings of Christianity.
(1) The Hebrew origin of Christianity. As among all early peoples, so in the case of the Israelites, religion, morality, and civil law were presented to the popular consciousness in one undirferentiated mass of rules. The law of Moses, the code of ancient Israel, combined in its scope rules of worship, norms of moral conduct, and the legal ordinances of the nation; all alike were regarded as the express commands of Jehovah. The conception of their national god as a god of righteousness gave a peculiar prominence to the ethical portion of these commands. We find, therefore, the Decalogue, combining, as it does, the fundamental principles of religion and the most essential moral norms, early regarded as the core of the Hebrew code; and, after the early Christians had freed themselves from the trammels of the old ceremonial law, the "Thou shalt" and the
law, politics, and society which France during the last hundred years has been the instrument of diffusing over the western world."—Maine, Ancient Law, p. 80.
