Page:Select Essays in Anglo-American Legal History, Volume 1.djvu/263

 8. STUBBS: THE CANON LAW 249 lectures. Here then you have my motive; wanting to know something of the history of Canonical Jurisprudence, I undertake to lecture upon it. I shall be wiser, that is, more convinced of my own ignorance, before I have done. If I were a philosopher I should begin thus : The legal history of a nation or institution must be the history of the successive stages by which it develops or adopts laws, acr cording to the stages of its social, or moral, or political, or religious development; or thus: As a nation develops in civilisation, or foreign policy, or in specialised ambitions, or in consciousness of nationality, or in peculiar constitutional identity, it has to develop new branches or systems of law, or to borrow them ready-made from nations whose polity is in advance of its own, who have made themselves repre-. sentative nations In the particular branch of sociology in which it desires to regulate itself. Hence, in England, on the original superstructure of ancient popular law is super- induced. In the age of the Conquest, the jus honorarium of the royal courts ; and, when the royal courts have become the courts of common law, on their rigour is superinduced the moderating influence of Equity and Appeal: on the conversion of the nation to Christianity a religious discipline is a necessity, and on that religious discipline, as the frame-' work of the Church is built up, there is based a canonical jurisprudence; if the nation is In close communication with foreign churches or a great Catholic religion, it naturally adopts, from them or it, its religious legislation ; if not in such close intercourse, it develops a system of its own, and, when the intercourse becomes closer, modifies its own until it Is more or less in harmony with that of the nations round ' it, always retaining more or less of its own home growth. Or again, still as the philosopher, I might say: Religion, Law and Morality cover the area of human action with , rules and sanctions, and, with different origins, motives, and machinery, regulate regions of common energy, a number of ' acts that fall within reach of each or all. The fact that they spring from different sources necessitates the formation of distinct systems ; the fact that they cover the same ground ^ accounts for the possibility of conflicting operation ; the fact.