prohibited all military exercises on Sunday, and at the same time enjoined the observance of Friday in memory of the death of Christ.'

Nay, he went so far, in well-meaning but mistaken zeal, as to require of his soldiers, even the pagan ones, the positive observance of Sunday, by pronouncing at a signal the following prayer, which they mechanically learned: "Thee alone we acknowledge as God; thee we confess as king; to thee we call as our helper; from thee we have received victories; through thee we have conquered enemies. Thee we thank for good received; from thee we hope for good to come. Thee we all most humbly beseech to keep our Constantine and his God-fearing sons through long life healthy and victorious."' Though this formula was held in a deistical generalness, yet the legal injunction of it lay clearly beyond the province of the civil power, trespassed on the rights of conscience, and unavoidably encouraged hypocrisy and empty formalism.

Later emperors declared the profanation of Sunday to be sacrilege, and prohibited also the collecting of taxes and private debts (368 and 386), and even theatrical and circus performances, on Sunday and the high festivals (386 and 425).' But this interdiction of public amusements, on which a council of Carthage (399 or 401) with reason insisted, was probably never rigidly enforced, and was repeatedly supplanted by the op posite practice, which gradually prevailed all over Europe.*

1 Eus. Vit. Const. iv. 18-20. Comp. Sozom. i. 8. In our times military parades and theatrical exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and other European cities are so frequent on no other day as on the Lord's day! In France, political elections are usually held on the Sabbath!

Eus. Vit. Const. 1. iv. c. 20. guage, as Eusebius says in c. 19.

The formulary was prescribed in the Latin lanHe is speaking of the whole army (comp. c. 18), and it may presumed that many of the soldiers were heathen.

• The second law against opening theatres on Sundays and festivals (A.D. 425) in the Cod. Theodos. 1. xv. tit. 7, l. 5, says expressly: "Omni theatrorum atque cir censium voluptate per universas urbes. . denegata, totæ Christianorum ac fidelium mentes Dei cultibus occupentur."

• As Chrysostom, at the end of the fourth century and the beginning of the fifth, often complains that the theatre is better attended than the church; so down to this day the same is true in almost all the large cities on the continent of Europe. Only in England and the United States, under the influence of Calvinism and Puritanism are the theatres closed on Sunday.

§ 18. Influence of Christianity on Civil Legislation. The Justinian Code.

Comp. on this subject particularly the works cited at § 13, sub ii, by RHOER, MEYSENBURG, and TROPLONG; also GIBBON, chap. xliv (an admirable summary of the Roman law), MILMAN: Lat. Christianity, vol. I. B. iii. chap. 5, and in part the works of SCHMIDT and CHASTEL on the influnce of Christianity upon society in the Roman empire, quoted in vol. i. § 86.

While in this way the state secured to the church the welldeserved rights of a legal corporation, the church exerted in turn a most beneficent influence on the state, liberating it by degrees from the power of heathen laws and customs, from the spirit of egotism, revenge, and retaliation, and extending its care beyond mere material prosperity to the higher moral interests of society. In the previous period we observed the contrast between Christian morality and heathen corruption in the Roman empire.' We are now to see how the principles of Christian morality gained public recognition, and began at least in some degree to rule the civil and political life.

As early as the second century, under the better heathen emperors, and evidently under the indirect, struggling, yet irresistible influence of the Christian spirit, legislation took a reformatory, humane turn, which was carried by the Christian emperors as far as it could be carried on the basis of the ancient Græco-Roman civilization. Now, above all, the principle of justice and equity, humanity and love, began to assert itself in the state. For Christianity, with its doctrines of man's likeness to God, of the infinite value of personality, of the original unity of the human race, and of the common redemption through Christ, first brought the universal rights of man to bear in opposition to the exclusive national spirit, the heartless selfishness, and the political absolutism of the old world, which harshly separated nations and classes, and respected man only as a citizen, while at the same time it denied the right of citizenship to the great mass of slaves, foreigners, and barbarians."

1 Vol. ii. §§ 97-100.

Comp. Lactantius: Inst. divin. 1. v. c. 15.

Christ himself began his reformation with the low est orders of the people, with fishermen and taxgatherers, with the poor the lame, the blind, with demoniacs and sufferers of every kind, and raised them first to the sense of their dignity and their high destiny. So now the church wrought in the state and through the state for the elevation of the oppressed and the needy, and of those classes which under the reign of heathenism were not reckoned at all in the body politic, but were heartlessly trodden under foot. The reformatory motion was thwarted, it is true, to a considerable extent, by popular custom, which is stronger than law, and by the structure of society in the Roman empire, which was still essentially heathen and doomed to dissolution. But reform was at last set in motion, and could not be turned back even by the overthrow of the empire; it propagated itself among the German tribes. And although even in Christian states the old social maladies are ever breaking forth from corrupt human nature, sometimes with the violence of revolution, Christianity is ever coming in to restrain, to purify, to heal, and to console, curbing the wild passions of tyrants and of populace, vindicating the persecuted, mitigating the horrors of war, and repressing incalculable vice in public and in private life among Christian people. The most cursory comparison of Christendom with the most civilized heathen and Mohammedan countries affords ample testimony of this.

Here again the reign of Constantine is a turning point. Though an oriental despot, and but imperfectly possessed with the earnestness of Christian morality, he nevertheless enacted many laws, which distinctly breathe the spirit of Christian justice and humanity: the abolition of the punishment of crucifixion, the prohibition of gladiatorial games and cruel rites, the discouragement of infanticide, and the encouragement of the emancipation of slaves. Eusebius says he improved most of the old laws or replaced them by new ones.' Henceforward

1 Vit. Const. 1. iv. c. 26, where the most important laws of Constantine are recapitulated. Even the heathen Libanius (Basil. ii. p. 146) records that under Constantine and his sons legislation was much more favorable to the lower classes; though he accounts for this only by the personal clemency of the emperors.

we feel beneath the toga of the Roman lawgiver the warmth of a Christian heart. We perceive the influence of the evangelical preaching and exhortations of the father of monasticism out of the Egyptian desert to the rulers of the world, Constantine and his sons: that they should show justice and mercy to the poor, and remember the judgment to come.

Even Julian, with all his hatred of the Christians, could not entirely renounce the influence of his education and of the reigning spirit of the age, but had to borrow from the church many of his measures for the reformation of heathenism. He recognized especially the duty of benevolence toward all men, charity to the poor, and clemency to prisoners; though this was contrary to the heathen sentiment, and though he proved himself anything but benevolent toward the Christians. But then the total failure of his philanthropic plans and measures shows that the true love for man can thrive only in Christian soil. And it is remarkable, that, with all this involuntary concession to Christianity, Julian himself passed not a single law in line with the progress of natural rights and equity.'

His successors trod in the footsteps of Constantine, and to the end of the West Roman empire kept the civil legislation under the influence of the Christian spirit, though thus often occasioning conflicts with the still lingering heathen element, and sometimes temporary apostasy and reaction. We observe also, in remarkable contradiction, that while the laws were milder in some respects, they were in others even more severe and bloody than ever before: a paradox to be explained no doubt in part by the despotic character of the Byzantine gov ernment, and in part by the disorders of the time."

1

It now became necessary to collect the imperial ordinances'

1 Troplong, p. 127. C. Schmidt, 378.

• Comp. de Rhoer, p. 59 sqq. The origin of this increased severity of penal laws is, at all events, not to be sought in the church; for in the fourth and fifth cen turies she was still rather averse to the death penalty. Comp. Ambros. Ep. 25 and 26 (al. 51 and 52), and Augustine, Ep. 153 ad Macedonium.

* Constitutiones or Leges. If answers to questions, they were called Rescripta; if spontaneous decrees, Edicta.

in a codex or corpus juris. Of the first two attempts of this kind, made in the middle of the fourth century, only some fragments remain.' But we have the Codex Theodosianus, which Theodosius II. caused to be made by several jurists between the years 429 and 438. It contains the laws of the Christian emperors from Constantine down, adulterated with many heathen elements; and it was sanctioned by Valentinian III. for the western empire. A hundred years later, in the flourishing period of the Byzantine state-church despotism, Justinian I., who, by the way, cannot be acquitted of the re proach of capricious and fickle law-making, committed to a number of lawyers, under the direction of the renowned Tribonianus,' the great task of making a complete revised and digested collection of the Roman law from the time of Hadrian to his own reign; and thus arose, in the short period of seven years (527-534), through the combination of the best talent and the best facilities, the celebrated Codex Justinianeus, which thenceforth became the universal law of the Roman empire, the sole text book in the academies at Rome, Constantinople, and Berytus, and the basis of the legal relations of the greater part of Christian Europe to this day.'

'The Codex Gregorianus and Codex Hermogenianus; so called from the compilers, two private lawyers. They contained the rescripts and edicts of the heathen emperors from Hadrian to Constantine, and would facilitate a comparison of the heathen legislation with the Christian.

'Tribonianus, a native of Side in Paphlagonia, was an advocate and a poet, and rose by his talents, and the favor of Justinian, to be quæstor, consul, and at last magister officiorum. Gibbon compares him, both for his comprehensive learning and administrative ability and for his enormous avarice and venality, with Lord Bacon. But in one point these statesmen were very different: while Bacon was a decided Christian in his convictions, Tribonianus was accused of pagan proclivities and of atheism. In a popular tumult in Constantinople the emperor was obliged to dismiss him, but found him indispensable and soon restored him.

The complete Codex Justinianeus, which has long outlasted the conquests of that emperor (as Napoleon's Code has outlasted his), comprises properly three separate works: (1) The Institutiones, an elementary text book of jurisprudence, of the year 588. (2) The Digesta or Pandecta (rávdektai, complete repository), an abtract of the spirit of the whole Roman jurisprudence, according to the decisions of the most distinguished jurists of the earlier times, composed in 530–533. (3) The Codex, first prepared in 528 and 529, but in 584 reconstructed, enlarged, and improved, and hence called Codex repetitæ præ'ectionis; containing 4,648 ordi