internal legal arrangements of conquered states as much as was possible. But the process by which she reduced to fundamental uniformity the various provinces was an exhibition of consummate instinctive governing power.1 This process, however, involved changes in her own constitution and life. Her religion suffered most drearily under the constantly increasing complication of her superstitions, and became more and more distinct from her ethics and social order.

Upon the ethics of ecclesiastical Christianity, however, Rome left the stamp of her institutionalism. To this day duty to the organization, and the obligation of conformity even against the personal judgment, is at once an institutional and political strength and a religious and ethical weakness of the communion which still bears the name of Rome.

The ethics underlying Roman law was never Christian and remains substantially Stoic up to its very last formulation in the code of Napoleon. Even when it passes for Christian law it soon appears to the really Christian student that he is dealing with the exalted conceptions of Stoicism, but not with the Sermon on the Mount. The eclecticism characteristic of all Roman thought, and particularly of Cicero, enabled the later Roman men to take up Christian elements into their thinking, and thus to make a body of conceptions, often really hostile to Christian thinking, seemingly acceptable. No one could be more pronouncedly pagan than was Cicero, but Ambrose's edition of his ethics passes for Christian into our own age.

And on the side of Rome's organization the influence upon Christian ethics was simply overwhelming. The Roman Catholic church became the heir of Rome's imperial policy and imperial ideals. Rome ruled by a judicious assertion of authority, stern and relentless where her sway seemed in any way involved, with the largest and most amazing concessions to in'Cf. Marquardt, I.: "Römische Staatsverwaltung," 2d ed., vol. I, pp. 497-567.

'Cf. Marquardt, I.: "Römische Staatsverwaltung," 2d ed. (revised by Georg Wissowa), Leipsic, 1881-1885, vol. III, pp. 1-480.

'Cf. von Jhering: "Geist des Römischen Rechts,” vol. I.

dividual differences where her authority was taken for granted. This has marked the temper of historical Christianity ever since, and even in modern Protestantism (as in the state churches of England and Germany) still gives the model for imitation, often unconsciously.

Nor is it a matter of indifference that Rome supplied the sacred language in which Christian ecclesiasticism was to do its thinking. More than once in the course of our history we shall have occasion to mark the fact that the use of Latin has a distinct and interesting influence upon the development of the ethics of Christianity.

IV. THE OLD TESTAMENT PREPARATION

1

What gives the ethics of the Old Testament its peculiar character and universal significance is not simply its "desire to keep the flame of a pure service of God alight," 1 nor yet its monotheism, but its linking its ethics with its conception of God, and making the communal life the field for the exhibition of the qualities of the God the community worshipped.

Just so soon as God was conceived of as final righteousness, even if the type of that righteousness was often poor and low,

LITERATURE. See the literature given in Driver, S. R.: "An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament"; 8th ed., 1909.-Smith, H. P.: “Old Testament History"; New York, 1903 (see literature in the Preface).—Wade, G. W.: "Old Testament History"; London, 1901; pp. x-xii.-Kent, C. F.: "The Student's Old Testament"; New York; 4 vols. so far published, 1904, 1905, 1907, 1910; classified bibliography in appendices to each volume.-Wellhausen, Julius: "Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte"; Berlin, 1901.— Winckler, Hugo: "Geschichte Israels"; Berlin, 1895-1900; 2 vols.-Cornill, C. H.: "Der Israelitische Prophetismus"; five lectures; Strasburg, 1900.The articles in Cheyne's "Encyclopædia Biblica" and Hastings's "Bible Dictionary," as well as the standard commentaries on the various books, good lists of which are given by Kent in the volumes mentioned. A good introduction to modern Bible study is Briggs, C. A.: "General Introduction to the Study of Holy Scripture"; New York, 1899.-Schultz, H.: "Alttestamentliche Theologie"; 5th ed.; Tübingen, 1896; English translation, Edinburgh, 1892; 2 vols.Duff, A.: “The Theology and Ethics of the Hebrews"; New York, 1902.

1 Curtius: "Gesammelte Reden," Berlin, 1882, vol. II, pp. 2 and 9, quoted by Ziegler: "Geschichte der christlichen Ethik," 2d ed., Strasburg, 1892, p. 14.

and the demand was made that the community should show its fidelity to its divinity by conforming to that type of righteousness, the way was at last open for a boundlessly fruitful ethical development.

In all religions God is linked to his people by some bond. In Judaism at last this bond was interpreted in terms of the ethical life and in prophetism at its best in terms exclusively ethical.' Thus at last the communal life was given not merely a political or legal, but an ethical content, and it was more and more clearly realized that the communal life was conditioned upon fulfilling righteousness. On the lowest plane this righteousness might be thought of as simply ritual correctness, a type of magic cleanness, but this never held the whole field of even the most priestly Jewish vision. It might be true that a ritual development gave a certain character to the ethics of Israel, but it never wholly dominated them.

The ethical development cannot be traced as a simple matter of chronology, for the documents only permit of tentative reconstructions of the history, and these reconstructions show that various developments were going on side by side.

Two main lines of development may be called the prophetic and the priestly. The school of the Deuteronomists sought to make a synthesis of these two main types, and later the Greek influence gave a still further "wisdom" type. In all the developments, even in the "wisdom" documents, may be traced the slow ethical acquirements gained in the long process from the nomadic pastoral life of the early border tribes to the commercial trading life of the diaspora. The virtues of a gracious primitive hospitality and the shrewd thrift of a later commercial period jostle one another in the latest writings of the Greek period. The nation became, in part at least, a trading community. Tradition ascribed the transition period to the reign of Solomon, but the semi-nomadic "shepherds," like Amos of Tekoa, who 'Micah 6: 1-8; Amos 5: 1-27; Ezekiel 18: 1-9. 2 Proverbs 3: 27 and 22: 7.

travelled up and down the trade routes with their flocks and herds, may have long before Solomon's traditional date become Oriental merchants as one still sees them in the bazaars of Cairo and Constantinople.

In the valleys of Palestine there persisted memories of all the economic stages through which the tribes of Israel passed. Shepherds watched their flocks and drove them from pasture to pasture as in the days of Jacob and Abraham. The vine dresser and small peasant farmers clustered about the foothills and made the richer soil of the valley yield up its fruit. The fisherman plied his trade on the inland lakes, while a more prosperous "diaspora" bound together Rome, Alexandria, and the cities of Asia Minor in an elaborate and most profitable system of money exchange.

The impress of all these economic phases is upon the religion and morals of that Judaism whose chief records are the canonical books.

Prophetism.-The Ethics of Prophetism in the seventh and eighth centuries before Christ mark the turning-point in the history of Israel. Material prosperity seems to have come in the life of the northern kingdom. Probably the developed trade routes and the relative safety of both northern and southern kingdoms as vassal states, playing off Egypt against the great rising northern powers, gave commerce and industry large rewards. Luxury became rife. Now to the stern, hardy seminomadic prophetism of the desert, represented by such faithful followers of Jehovah, or Jahwe, as Amos, the shepherd-merchant, this self-indulgence, and conformity to the religious cults of more advanced peoples amidst the pleasure-seeking of the town was a direct betrayal of the national God. If criticism be right in its conjectural excisions, the message of the older prophets was almost wholly a demand to return to the relative simplicity of

1 Amos 6:1-6; Hosea 12:7-8.

2 Cf. articles in "Encyclopædia Biblica" (Cheyne) and in Hastings's "Bible Dictionary," on Amos, Micah, Hosea, and Isaiah.

the older semi-nomadic period. The virtues praised and the vices denounced are those in the foreground of a relatively simple pastoral life. The new trading life, with its oppression of the debtor class, its private ownership of land and speculation in its increasing values, its violence and robbery under legal forms, with corruption of courts and perversion of justice, seemed to the nomad shepherd utterly abhorrent and destructive. As he sweeps the political horizon, made familiar to him, no doubt, as he travelled with his flocks and herds from north to south and south to north, he sees Damascus, Gaza, Ammon, and Moab judged for cruelty, slave-hunting, slaughter of women and children, sacrilege, and commercial greed; and realizes that these are more and more becoming the sins of the Hebrew tribes as they fall heirs to the life of the valleys.

The remedy, however, is only a return to the simpler life. Moreover, the semi-nomadic prophetism never could evolve elaborate stated places of worship or complicated sacrificial ritual. The emphasis was put upon the strong righteousness of Jahwe, the firm protection of the poor and the oppressed.' Commercial competition is the great destroyer of tribal and family bonds built up on the simple communism of the family group. Amos therefore fiercely denounces what, to him, was destructive of all the values he set store by.

The negative denunciatory message of Amos is, however, supplemented by the utterances of the priestly Hosea, whose view of life is softer and more constructive. Jahwe is pictured as the forgiving husband, and one of the most fruitful religioethical conceptions of history is thus introduced. The relations of the nation to God as the Father of the nation is further expanded in the Isaian anthology, for Jahwe is thought of as at least the prospective Father of all nations. The prophetic conception of righteousness is high, and the communal life is the proper field for the moral man to prove his loyalty to Jahwe. The ritual elements are not wholly ignored, but they are distinctly put in the secondary place. And "to do justly and love Isaiah 56: 1-8.

Amos 5:21-27.

2 Amos 8: 1-10.

Micah 6:8.