But wherever there is action there is also reaction, and no power or force can wholly escape this law.  So Roman thought, acted on by Christianity, reacted and modified in many respects the Gospel.  Not always in a bad way, sometimes it helped its developments.  For the Providence which made the Gospel for the Romans made the Romans for the Gospel.

The great legacy bequeathed to mankind by ancient Rome was law.  Other nations, it is true, had codes of law, like the Institutes of Manu in India, or the jurisprudence of Solon and the enactments of Lycurgus.  But Roman law from the beginning was sanctified by the conviction that it was founded on justice, and not merely on expediency or prudence.  In submitting to the laws, even when they were cruel and oppressive, the Roman was obeying, not force, but conscience.  The view which Plato gave as an ideal in Crito was realized in Roman society from the first.  Consider the cruel enactments which made the debtors the slaves of the creditor, and the fact that when the plebeians were ground to the earth by that oppression, they did not attempt to resist the law, but in their despair fled from their homes, beyond the jurisdiction of Rome, to establish a new city where these enactments could not reach them.  Only when the laws are thus enforced by the public conscience as something sacred, does society become possible; and this sense of the divinity which hedges a code of laws has been transmitted from ancient Rome into the civilization of Europe.

Cicero, in his admirable treatise on the laws, which unfortunately we have in an imperfect condition, devotes the whole of the first book to establishing eternal justice as the basis of all jurisprudence.  No better text-book could have been found for the defence of what was called “the higher law,” in the great American antislavery struggle, than this work of Cicero.  “Let us establish,” he says, “the principles of justice on that supreme law which has existed from all ages before any legislative enactments were written, or any political governments formed.”  “Among all questions, there is none more important to understand than this, that man is born for justice; and that law and equity have not been established by opinion, but by nature.”  “It is an absurd extravagance in some philosophers to assert that all things are necessarily just which are established by the laws and institutions of nations.”  “Justice does not consist in submission to written laws.”  “If the will of the people, the decrees of the senate, the decisions of magistrates, were sufficient to establish rights, then it might become right to rob, to commit adultery, to forge wills, if this was sanctioned by the votes or decrees of the majority.”  “The sum of all is, that what is right should be sought for its own sake, because it is right, and not because it is enacted.”