Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/358

348 fellowmen which primitive law sought only to mitigate. This is brought out very clearly in Greek political philosophy. Thus, in Plato's ideal state the state is to assign everyone to the class for which he is best fitted and the law is to keep him there, in order that a perfect harmony and unity may prevail. St. Paul's well-known exhortation (Ephesians v, 22ff. and vi, 1–5) in which he calls on all the faithful to exert themselves to do their duty in the class in which they find themselves, proceeds upon the same conception. The Roman lawyers turned this idea of political philosophy into law. In the great institutional book of Roman law, the Institutes of Justinian, we are told that the precepts of law come to three; to live honorably, not to injure another, and to give to everyone his due. The idea here is that the state and the law exist to maintain harmoniously the existing social order. What the interests of another are, which one is not to injure, what makes anything another's due, so that it is to be given him, are matters which are left wholly to the traditional social organization.

(3) BEFORE AND AFTER THE REFORMATION

On the downfall of the Roman empire the Germanic invaders brought back for a season the primitive ideas of buying off vengeance and keeping the peace through arbitrary peaceful solution of disputes by mechanical modes of trial and hard and fast rules. But during the Middle Ages these conceptions gradually yielded to the classical idea of the legal order as a means of preserving the social status quo, the more since the latter was fortified by the unassailable authority of texts of scripture and of the Roman law. Moreover, from the thirteenth century on, philosophers more and more sought to sustain authority by reason, and in this way they prepared the way for a new conception which developed in the seventeenth century. For by that time two events of capital importance had compelled a complete revolution in legal and political philosophy. In the first place the Reformation had divorced the philosophy of law and of politics from theology and had set them free from the authority of the church. This was the work of the Protestant jurist theologians of the sixteenth century. Secondly, following the nationalist