"Thou shalt not" of Sinai still thundered in the consciences of men as the veritable law of God.
(2) A second fact which had an influence in giving a jural form to Christian conceptions of morality was the three centuries of hostility and practical separation between Christianity and the Empire. During this period the Christians made a constant effort to have as little as possible to do with the secular courts. The Hebrew scriptures were regarded as revealing a divine code of laws, and by means of this code they constituted themselves 'an orderly community essentially independent of the State.' The moral maxims of the new religion, in taking the place of all civil law for three hundred years, became stamped themselves with the jural form. Among the Greeks, while moral laws were often regarded as of divine origin, the notion of command, the expression of a will, was never more than dimly conceived in the background. These laws were principles of conduct by which alone virtue or happiness could be attained, rather than the imperatives of a divine lawgiver sanctioned by rewards and punishments. In Judaism and Christianity the notion of the imperative came into the foreground.
(3) Besides its Hebrew origin and the peculiar circumstances of its early history, Christianity in the West was subject to a Roman influence which made for legalism. The peculiar jural bent of the best Roman thought and the high success of Rome's legal institutions exerted a powerful effect on Latin Christianity. The very language was saturated with legal concepts. The mere translation of the New Testament into Latin gave to Christian doctrine a decided jural tone that had been quite unsuspected in the Greek. God was no longer the Heavenly Father of the common man or the Universal Reason of the Greek philosopher, so much as the Moral Governor of the world, bound to maintain a just government. Then, too, the ecclesiastical authorities not only exerted all their influence over the Teutonic invaders towards maintaining Roman jurisprudence, but they adopted the Roman law as the canon law of the Church.
All of these legalizing influences had had time to work their
