and the religion of the reason), by which is understood that which is permanent and everywhere the same in contrast to the temporary and the changeable, that which is innate in contrast to that which has been developed, in contrast, further, to that which has been revealed.  Whatever passes as law in all places and at all times is natural law, says Grotius; that which all men believe forms the content of natural religion, says Lord Herbert.  Before long it comes to be said:  that alone is genuine, true, healthy, and valuable which has eternal and universal validity; all else is not only superfluous and valueless but of evil, for it must be unnatural and corrupt.  This step is taken by Deism, with the principle that whatever is not natural or rational in the sense indicated is unnatural and irrational.  Parallel phenomena are not wanting, further, in the philosophy of law (Gierke, Althusius).  But these errors must not be too harshly judged.  The confidence with which they were made sprang from the real and the historical force of their underlying idea.

As already stated, the “natural” forms the antithesis to the supernatural, on the one hand, and to the historical, on the other.  This combination of the revealed and the historical will not appear strange, if we remember that the mediaeval view of the world under criticism was, as Christian, historico-religious, and, moreover, that for the philosophy of religion the two in fact coincide, inasmuch as revelation is conceived as an historical event, and the historical religions assume the character of revealed.  The term arbitrary, applied to both in common, was questionable, however:  as revelation is a divine decree, so historical institutions are the products of human enactment, the state, the result of a contract, dogmas, inventions of the priesthood, the results of development, artificial constructions!  It took long ages for man to free himself from the idea of the artificial and conventional in his view of history.  Hegel was the first to gather the fruit whose seeds had been sown by Leibnitz, Lessing, Herder, and the historical school of law.  As often, however, as an attempt was made from this standpoint of origins to show laws in the course of history, only one could be reached, a law of necessary degeneration, interrupted at times by sudden restorations—­thus the Deists, thus Machiavelli and Rousseau.  Everything degenerates, science itself only contributes to the fall—­therefore, back to the happy beginnings of things!

If, finally, we inquire into the position of the Church in regard to the questions of legal philosophy, we may say that, among the Protestants, Luther, appealing to the Scripture text, declares rulers ordained by God and sacred, though at the same time he considers law and politics but remotely related to the inner man; that Melancthon, in his Elements of Ethics (1538), as in all his philosophical text-books,[1] went back to Aristotle, but found the source of natural law in the Decalogue, being followed in this by Oldendorp (1539), Hemming (1562), and B. Winkler (1615).[2]