Through the imperial officer known as praetor percgrinus this form of will was there made familiar, as elsewhere outside of the imperial city. Paul's extended resi dence must have made Ephesians familiar with his style of expression, so if he had needed such an allusion it would have been clear to them. But sealing was common everywhere, aside from the Pretorian will (Maine, p. 264) — private seals, employed instead of signatures, were universal, — and this instrument, with all the validity acquired by successive edicts, did not pass absolute rights of inheritance, such as Paul in spirit ual things was wont to assert. The dignity of an allusion to the Pretorian will here — if one there can be, the seal being the only common element —- is unquestionable. It was one of those liberalizations of earlier law, which accompanied the extension of citizen ship through the empire. Others went along with it which eventually affected the society and the civilization of our modern world. But this was itself only an alternate form of will, and for long little used, the testamentum per aes et libram still continuing even later than the empire. So good a scholar as Endicott observes, in loco, that " Any purely object ive meaning in reference to heathen, or even Jewish customs, seems very doubt' fill." Still more doubtful, it seems to me, is any reminiscence of Roman law in Hebrews vii. 22, "by so much also hath Jesus be come the surety of a better covenant" (Ac. Version "testament"). One can agree readily to the observation that the Pauline figures of speech are logical and legal, not poetical and ornamental, and even see how an habitual recollection of the familiac emptor would have been easy here, if he had coupled or made adjacent the thought of the redemptive "purchase" of the church, such as appears in his ad dress at Miletus. (Acts, xx. 17-28. Cf. Clark, "Regal Period," 118.) The pur
chaser of the familia, that is of all the rights, privileges, duties, and obligations existing in and through the family, in cluding property and slaves, is indeed the central and most interesting personage in the ancient mancipation, which, along with the ancient plebeian will, connects the infancy of society with its riper ages. But with other antique formalities de scribed by Gaius in his "Commentaries" (II. § 104), this in time lapsed, and became "a mere figure-head," says Prof. Yladley, and a century before Justinian had been given up. Yet in Paul's day, a century before Gaius, it must still have had a known meaning, which, if he wrote to the Hebrews, he might have employed as significant but for their ignorance as a people of the classical mancipation, fa miliac emptor and all. This suggests a question more deeply vexed : Does the written will appear any where in the text of Paul? The Hebrews were not a will-making people. Yet it is in this same epistle to the Hebrews that the writer — whoever he was — has in mind that of which his readers knew nothing, however familiar he was with it, being purely Roman. (Ep. Heb. ix. 15-20. A. V.) " When the Romans are best known to us," says Hadley, " they were eminently a will-making people ... If a will was not executed with the precise formalities pre scribed, it had by the law of the Twelve Tables no validity whatever." Not only were these formalities, but the will itself — at first unwritten, declared orally in the comitia curiata, then placed on waxen tablets with seals of seven witnesses at tached — was a purely Roman invention. Mr. Maine doubts if the power to make one was originally known to any other people,. " No evil," he says, " seems to have been considered a heavier visitation than the forfeiture of testamentary privi leges; no curse appears to have been bitterer than that which imprecated on an
