other foundation than that which both heathen and Christian writers of the highest repute have always assigned to it, the will of God; in other words, law must be ordained by a power which can enforce obedience. For rules of conduct, which depend only for their authority on mutual agreement, are only temporary conventions wanting the essential principles of law. They are not of universal obligation; nor are they rules of morality, properly speaking. Moral rules are necessarily dependent on religious sanctions; hence the validity of laws does not depend upon the rules of expedience, or on mere utility. These great principles, frequently lost sight of, and often denied by superficial writers, form the basis of his inquiries. Our author, with professional caution, has supported them with a profusion of witnesses from Plato and Cicero downwards, to Selden, Grotius, and Lord Bacon.

We may,

however, at once assume the truth of these positions, and conIclude with Hooker: "Of law there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is the bosom of God."

So far there is no difficulty. But now the question arises, how much of this law lingered among the heathen, and whence did they obtain the remainder of the institutions by which they were actually governed? That something lingered, is certain; not having the law, they were a law unto themselves. They had the light of nature. Upon this Mr. Ben. Marsden insists, in his first chapter, "On the Law of Nature," and he gives us sufficient proofs that it was recognized by the heathen themselves. But after all it gave but a feeble light; for it was overpowered, as time passed on, by the mists of sensuality, and the darkening shades of ignorance. If we could look for a clear expression of its voice on any subject, it would surely be on that which concerns human happiness in this world, more perhaps than any other, the relation of the sexes. Yet we find in the remotest ages the utmost possible difference even upon this point. In Southern Asia woman was treated as an animal; in Germany she was almost worshipped as a god. In Asia one man had many wives; in Britain, when Cæsar landed, one woman had many husbands. It is evident that we must look further, and see whether some fresh light had not broken in upon the minds of those heathen nations whose superior civilization first drew upon them the attention of the world, and still engages so large a portion of our studies. Whence did they obtain their knowledge of the great principles of national and social jurisprudence, when the voice of the law of nature had become so feeble? There was one great lawgiver who had delivered only what was the voice of God. His institutions had instantly become, and continued for ages to be, the national, the civil, the social, and the religious law of a whole people. And this from a remote antiquity; an

antiquity so remote, that it preceded (with the exception of Egypt) probably every other national civilization. Had these Mosaic institutions, then, no influence upon surrounding tribes? Did they tend in no degree to form the institutions of other nations? We must confess that to us it seems that to maintain this is, on the face of it, a bold, if not a rash undertaking. We are aware that, till lately, such an inquiry as that to which Mr. Ben. Marsden invites us, would scarcely have gained a moment's attention. The idolatry of classical studies, and the no less blameable neglect of all biblical research, disqualified whole generations of learned men from taking any real part in studies which to them were utterly distasteful; but it was not always so. Gale's Court of the Gentiles, a ponderous work of massive learning, was read with the respect it merits, two hundred years ago; and Jacob Bryant, in the last century, was not without many converts. Both of them wanted judgment, both carried their views further perhaps than sound reasoning warranted; but they were learned men, and totally undeserving of the contempt with which they have been treated. They found the type of everything the Gentiles knew worth knowing in one or other of the facts of Sacred history, or in the laws of Moses. This was no doubt extravagant, but not so unreasonble as the reaction which followed, and which contemptuously denied to the Mosaic code any influence whatever on the much landed institutions of Greece and Rome.

The case, however, stands thus:

"In the first place," says Mr. B. Marsden, "we find it stated in Scripture, that the wisdom of their laws should make the Hebrew system the admiration of the world. Deut. iv. 5, 6. Behold, I have taught you statutes and judgments, even as the Lord my God commanded me. Keep therefore and do them; for this is your wisdom and understanding in the sight of the nations, which shall hear all these statutes, and say, Surely this great nation is a wise and understanding people.'

"Plato, de Legibus, lib. iv., confesses that all laws came from God, and that no mortal man was the founder of laws. He says, therefore, "That no mortal men ought to institute any law; that is to say, without a divine authority.' Hence the most famous legislators of antiquity pretended to have received their laws from some divine oracle, probably in imitation of the manner in which the laws were given to Moses. Numa pretended to have received his from the nymph Egeria; Minos, from Jupiter; Lycurgus, from Apollo; and Zaleucus, from Minerva." (p. 30.)

It is a remarkable circumstance, again, that the best systems of heathen jurisprudence in other words, the best forms of civilization-were to be found amongst the nations least remote from Palestine; or (if those of southern Asia may put in their claim) still amongst nation, to whom it is tolerably certain that the early Jewish history was not unknown. It has been assumed far too readily, that the Mediterranean nations had no

acquaintance with the Jews. The probabilities, and indeed the known facts of history, go to prove just the contrary. The Jews became a great nation, and acquired their capital city under king David, before Homer sang, or the Greeks were consolidated into one great people or cluster of nations. Solomon extended his empire far into the eastern wilderness, and southward to the Euphrates, long before Romulus or any other warrior savage had laid the foundations of Rome. Yet king David had intimate friendship with Hiram, king of Tyre, and the king of the Sidonians; and Solomon, his son, who built Tadmor in the utmost wilderness, engaged the same Hiram to traffic on his behalf for the luxuries of India, and his fame brought the Queen of the South to make her royal pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Now, as all our readers who have not forgotten their Virgil will recollect, Tyre was the great Mediterranean seaport, which, long before the pious Eneas fled from Troy, had colonized northern Africa and built Carthage.

"Urbs antiqua fuit, Tyrii tenuere coloni."

Whether or not the Queen of Sheba was an Ethiopian queen, it is impossible that she or her train should leave Jerusalem unacquainted with the legal institutions of the nation, which under Solomon had now risen to the highest pitch of human grandeur, or that she should not have introduced the knowledge of them to her subjects. Nor does it seem at all probable to us, that Jonah was the only instance of a servant of the true God who went down to the sea in one of the ships of Tarsus. What is the meaning of the references, which the Psalms contain, to those who go down to the sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters, and there see and admire the power and wonders of the great Jehovah? It has been too readily conceded, that because classic history makes no mention of the Jews, it had therefore no acquaintance with them. That indeed, as regards the Greeks, this is too large a concession, Mr. B. Marsden shows by some apt quotations from Plato, in his second chapter, "On the Sources of Ancient Jurisprudence." One reason why Greek and Roman authors, proud and sensitive as they were, make so little mention of the Jews until they had become a dispersed and captive race, may have been the utter indifference, not to say contempt, with which the early Jew upon his travels would regard everything he saw in foreign lands, and this more especially in Western Europe, with which he could have no sympathy whatever; for he was an Oriental; and when he brought home with him the vices of the heathen, they were always the luxurious vices, or idolatries of the East. Greeks and Romans might be influenced by his presence, but they would not be proud of acknowledging the obligation. We ourselves are not flattered by the presence of a haughty stranger, who sees in us nothing to admire. Other nations, more sensitive than we, are more

tenacious; and we apprehend it would be by no means difficult to mention more foreign states than one, who are striving to copy our institutions, while they think an Englishman, not always without reason, a cold and disagreeable guest, and wish him beyond their borders.

If these considerations do not prove that subsequent legislation in other nations was influenced by the Mosaic institutions, at least they remove what may be termed the à priori objections against the proofs to be alleged. This is well stated by Mr. B. Marsden, as regards western Europe :

"If we should succeed in producing satisfactory reasons for supposing that the Greeks derived the elements, and indeed a great part of the details, of their judicial institutions from the Hebrews, it will hardly be necessary to prove that the Romans must refer theirs to the same origin. For, that they imported their primary laws from the Greeks, is confessed by their own writers, and is, indeed, a fact universally acknowledged. That to the Roman laws the civil institutions which prevail over the greater part of Europe owe their foundation, is a question beyond dispute, inasmuch as they are avowedly based upon the codes of the later emperors, into which were embodied the earlier laws of Rome; so that to determine their source, nothing will remain but, in some essential particulars, to establish their identity.

"Cicero, de Leg., lib. ii. § 25, says that the Decemvirs translated the laws of Solon almost word for word in the Ten Tables. Strangely enough, the example he gives is evidently of Hebrew extraction. For he proceeds: Our rule respecting the three suits of mourning, and other customs, were thus derived from Solon's regulations; and that edict respecting the mourning is expressed in his precise words, Let not women tear their cheeks, nor indulge their wailing, at funerals.' The very definition which Cicero gives of the origin of the term law is sufficient to show that it was never regarded as an original science. And so far, at least, as the Roman institutions were concerned, their foundation is attributed to a foreign source. His words are:- The Greek name for law (róμoc) is derived from véuw, to distribute, implying the very nature of the thing, that is, to give to every man his due. Whilst the Latin word lex conveys the idea of selection, à legendo. According to the Greeks, therefore, the name of law implies an equitable distribution; according to the Romans, an equitable selection. It is equally plain, that the use of the word selection implies the previous existence of institutions out of which the selection was to be made." (pp. 28, 29.)

The proof consists in the resemblance; and the bulk of this volume is occupied in tracing it out through various nations, and under various heads. The instances adduced are more or less exact. In some cases, they appear to us singularly striking; and the details of the successive struggles of law with barbarian lawlessness, and more particularly of its history during the dark ages, and of the decidedly Christian character it assumed amongst our own forefathers of the Anglo-Saxon period, are full

of interest. This is especially the case with the Dooms of king Alfred, which are prefaced with a translation of the Hebrew laws; and with these the laws of king Ina closely correspond. For these and other illustrations of the great principle for which he contends, we must refer to Mr. B. Marsden's volume. But indeed, of the influence of Moses on the legislation of Christian states, there can be no doubt; though, as Blackstone has remarked, it is sometimes difficult to trace out the channel by which the stream flowed; sometimes directly, more frequently meandering through Roman law. In the Dooms of Alfred, the source is distinctly avowed. In other codes, where no such avowal is made, strong similarity is enough to produce conviction in a high degree. The key which turns the complicated lock, was in all probability designed to fit it.

The institutions of the Egyptians may be supposed to present a difficulty. They seem in many points very closely to resemble those of the ancient Hebrews. It is the resemblance of analogy, where things, in themselves unlike, have certain points so far in common as to indicate that once there was a resemblance of a closer kind. The explanation seems to be, that the mythology of Egypt, vile as it was-and nothing was ever viler—was originally corrupted from that patriarchal faith which was also the foundation on which the superstructure of the Mosaic institutes was raised long afterwards. The same may be said of the Chinese and Hindu institutions. Mr. B. Marsden is aware of this. "Many resemblances in the laws of the Hindus and Chinese might have been added in illustration of their origin from Hebrew sources, had the compass of the volume permitted." Should another edition of his work be called for, "he hopes to enlarge it by the addition of some coincidences from these institutions." Some of them certainly are very remarkable. The earliest institutes of Hindu law are attributed to Menù, and we have a translation of them out of the original Sanscrit by Sir William Jones. We must place a few of these before the reader. How came Menù, whoever he may have been, possessed with such sublime sentiments as some of those which follow; they are believed to have been pronounced by the Supreme Being to Brahma :—

"Even I was even at first, not any other thing, that which exists, unperceived, supreme. Afterwards I am that which is; and He who

must remain Am I."

"Except the first cause, whatever may appear in the mind, know that to be the mind's Máyá (or delusion), as light as darkness.”

"As the great elements are in various beings entering, yet not entering, (that is, pervading, not destroying,) thus am I in them, yet not in them."

"Even thus far may enquiry be made by him who seeks to know the principle of mind, in union and separation, which must be everywhere always."