ton's case," as they are called, in which this test is embodied,- are now manipulated by most judges so as to protect the lunatic,
who, while knowing that an act is wrong, is prevented by disease of the mind from re straining himself from doing it. Lex.
ROMAN LAW AND CONTEMPORARY REVELATION. By Rev. George F. Magoun. AN observant and learned Massachusetts judge, not long since deceased, once said to a friend of the writer, that " in the Roman law there is a mine of interpretation of the writings of the Apostle Paul, all unworked." Now and then a cyclopaedia says the same thing. A fresh and suggestive writer suggests in the " Contemporary Re view " for August, 1891, that more satisfac tory comments on the writings referred to will be produced when scholars are, " in addition to other qualifications, thorough masters of the history of civil jurispru dence," and that what seems darkness in him more than in other writers is " due chiefly to our ignorance of the intellectual atmosphere in which he lived." The phrase "illiterate fishermen" is true enough of some of the New Testament writers to make it certain that they will yield no trace of the literature or law of the two great classical races of antiquity. Matthew, Mark, James, Peter, and Jude show none, nor that superior genius, John, nor the physician Luke. And of the recognized letters of Paul only those to persons re siding in Rome, in Ephesus, and in the country named from some early European settlers, Galatia, who alone could under stand them as Jews could not. And here we find unused the complex details and nice ties of Roman law which support no anal ogies to Christian teachings, which were therefore useless for his purpose. He em ploys only certain great peculiarities which furnished a "mould " or " costume " for his thoughts not to be found anywhere else. On the side of the law too, which, from his citizenship and his profession, the Scrip
ture writer who was born neither in Pales tine nor in Rome, but in a district of the Greek Asia lying between, knew well, we meet with limitations. It is an interesting circumstance that while the Justinian modi fications of the classical law of the republic were due largely to Christianity, the figures of speech and phraseology of the later Scriptures were influenced by the pristine law of the republican and regal periods of Rome. These considerations should have pre vented the assertion some years since in a New England review, by a Colorado writer, that the idea of the sovereignty or kingship of the divine being was intro duced into religious doctrine by John Calvin, who had studied Roman law before his preparation for the priesthood. As this idea, according to any chronology, is some centuries older than the time of Calvin or even that of Romulus and Remus, and as all English Bibles contain the eighth chap ter of the book of Samuel with its account of the revolt of the Jews, long before either, against theocratic rule, and their demand for a human king resulting in the reign of Saul, respect for chronology should have forestalled this blunder. Not less glaring is the clerical mistake which now and then traces to the Roman legislation the theology of atone ment for human sin which prevails in the earlier Scriptures and especially in Leviticus. Our judgment of the real in fluence upon an Apostle of Christ long after, of the jurisprudence of the empire in which he inherited citizenship, must be disencumbered as to such an influence where it was historically impossible, and
