voice, and invested with another character, speaking with man's understanding, and magnifying the idea of law by ascribing to it, first, the highest order of human authority-that is, power-and when foiled in its human aspirations, assuming the Divine and elevating the simple idea of mere humanity in its military legions, up to the idea of the Divine Humanity as developed, claimed, or asserted in its Papal infallibility and its great spiritual army.

The Mission of Rome was political and ecclesiastical, in the constructive sense of the words. To her it was given to organise the nations of Western Christendom, and establish a policy in State and Church that should last for ages, and become a root from which all future legislation should ramify and develop itself. The type of her future history is written in the lives of her first two kings, whether these two kings be regarded as real personages or not. They are none the less prophetic if they are to be taken as mere idealities. Modern scholarship has acquired a habit of throwing a cloud of suspicion on every ancient name with which is associated the idea of the miraculous or the supernatural, which only means the unusual or exceptional. Whether it be itself unwise in indulging this critical skepticism to excess or not, it would be irrelevant here to inquire. But there may be wisdom in that historical modesty which accepts the general truth, if not the particular details, of the ancient traditions of all nations,

regarding the spiritual communion of ancient times. Even in our own day we see these reputed hallucinations again appearing in greater number than ever; and it is not more difficult to believe in the real existence of Numa Pompilius, and that he retired to a garden and held communion with the Spirit Egeria, who dictated all the religious rites and ceremonies, the pontifical, augural, flaminal, and vestal constitution of the Eternal City, the future Queen of Nations, than it is to believe in the existence of an American Judge of the Supreme Court, or a Governor of Wisconsin, or any other American Medium, who professes, like Numa, to receive long letters from a departed spirit, and publish volumes of books, every word of which has been received by dictation from the invisible world. Those were days of spiritual manifestations, and all the world believed them; upon what evidence they best knew-we can only conjecture. But whether Romulus and Numa, the first two Kings of Rome, were real historical personages or not, they are prophecies, and distinctly foreshadow the twofold character and destiny, the State and the Church, of the Roman Empire.

The Political Mission of the Romans is first developed, but by the aid and under the sanction. of the most sincere and devout religious belief that the world at that time possessed, in a national or collective sense. Deeply and most sincerely imbued with the prevailing faith of his age, and

disposed to receive with honour and adoration every finite god of the nations which he subdued, the ancient Roman fought and conquered even more than the Jew, under the auspices of Religion; and the Sacramentum, or Roman soldier's oath, was justly considered the basis of Roman military courage. He was charitable and catholic, more so than the Roman Catholic now is; for he believed in all religions, though he very naturally preferred his own, and even forbade the introduction of foreign rites into the Metropolis of the Empire. But even this primeval prejudice at last gave way, as his dominion extended; and one by one he picked up the theologies of the world, till he came at last to the Jewish God, and wondered and discredited, but finally perceived that the idea was compatible with the unity of the Empire, and might cap the pyramid of the Great Superstructure. He raised a tower of the gods of the nations, and put the Absolute One on the top of it, when he had realised his own idea of Empire.

The Roman Mission, having for its object collective and politically organised or territorial unity, begins with a city, a local and material type. Its hopes of success are the hopes of a city, not of a nation or a family; and it increases its numbers, not by generation chiefly like Israel, but by adoption and conquest. It is dependent solely on its army and its wisdom; war and law therefore are the two great subjects of Roman study. Superadd Religion

and the three together constitute a triune feature which exhibits all that is peculiar in the character of a Roman. Collective unity was not forgotten, even under the kings, in the feeble beginning of the Eternal City. The Roman People, whatever that word at first meant, was then declared to be the source of all authority in the State. It was divided into three tribes, and each tribe into ten Curiæ, and these thirty Curiæ formed an assembly, the Comitia Curiata, from which alone all authority legitimately issued. Afterwards the meaning of the word "people" was enlarged by the extension of the franchise; and they were divided into centuries according to their wealth and age. By this arrangement all the citizens, patricians and plebeians, possessed of a certain amount of property (women, slaves, foreigners and outcasts excepted), were included, and entitled to vote in the Comitia Centuriata, which then became what the Comitia Curiata had been, the Supreme Court of Law. But the arrangement was such that the patricians at first had immeasurably the advantage over the plebeians; for, out of 193 centurial divisions, if the first 18 only agreed, they could carry any measure in spite of the remainder. The struggle of the plebeian majority, for several hundred years, to attain to equality of influence with the patrician orders, constitutes one of the principal internal features of the history of Rome. This equality was at last accomplished

B.C. 288, and then the Roman People at large, without any distinction of rank or class in voting, became the only legitimate source of Roman Legislation.

Passive, however, in all that regards the making of laws, a people must always be, and therefore Roman laws, as usual, originated with individuals, and were accepted by the popular assemblies; and in the year 452 B.C., they are reported to have first conceived the idea of having a written code of laws, after having done for 300 years without one. They then appointed ten men, Decemvirs, to draw up this code, which they did in ten tables. But these not being deemed sufficient, Decemvirs were again appointed, who added two more of what Cicero calls "leges iniqua"-very bad or unjust laws. These ten tables, and two tables, sanctioned by the people in their centurial assembly, became the foundation of the written law of Rome, and hence, also, of the civil law of Christendom; in which princes and nobles, soldiers and clergymen, as well as doctors in ecclesiastical law, still delight to accept the graduated honours, D.C.L. This was the first attempt of the old Romans to make a code of laws, and it was the last. All Roman laws took root in, and afterwards developed themselves from, these twelve tables, which were familiar to all the citizens; for the children were taught to repeat them at school, as Christian children the Ten Commandments. Laws