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132 of God, had, before his time, been zealously maintained by some theologians even of the reformed church; while, among the political theorists of the same period, it was not unusual to refer these distinctions (as was afterwards done by Hobbes) to the positive institutions of the civil magistrate. In opposition to both, it was contended by Grotius, that there is a natural law coëval with the human constitution, from which positive institutions derive all their force; a truth which, how obvious and tritical soever it may now appear, was so opposite in its spirit to the illiberal systems taught in the monkish establishments, that he thought it necessary to exhaust in its support all his stores of ancient learning. The older writers on Jurisprudence must, I think, be allowed to have had great merit in dwelling so much on this fundamental principle; a principle which renders “Man a Law to Himself;” and which, if it be once admitted, reduces the metaphysical question concerning the nature of the moral faculty to an object merely of speculative curiosity. To this faculty the ancients frequently give the name of reason; as in that noted passage of Cicero, where he observes, that “right reason is itself a law; congenial to the feelings of nature; diffused among all men; uniform; eternal; calling us imperiously to our duty, and peremptorily prohibiting every violation of it. Nor does it speak,” continues the same author, “one language at Rome and another at Athens, varying from place to place, or time to time; but it addresses itself to all nations, and to all ages; deriving its authority from the common sovereign of the universe, and carrying home its sanctions to every breast, by the inevitable punishment which it inflicts on transgressors.”

The habit of considering morality under the similitude of a law, (a law engraved on the human heart,) led not unnaturally to an application to ethical subjects of the technical language and arrangements of the Roman jurisprudence; and this innovation was at once facilitated and encouraged, by certain peculiarities in the nature of the most important of all the virtues,—that of justice; peculiarities which, although first explained fully by