therefore, of natural law is that good should be done and sought and evil avoided. Upon this principle are founded all the other precepts of the law of nature for the sake of whatever the practical reason naturally apprehends to be human goods.[1] Human laws are the special rules of particular communities deduced by the reason from the precepts of natural law. Obedience to the law of nature suffices for attaining to the natural or acquired virtues. Since, however, man is ordained to an end higher than the natural, it is necessary for the direction of human life that we have, besides natural and human law, divine law, given by God to man by special revelation. This divine law is double,—the one revealed in the Old Testament through the instrumentality of angels, the other in the New Testament by God himself made man. The divine law is ordained to secure the communion of men with God. To its positive commands, "without which the order of virtue, which is the order of reason, could not be observed," it adds as counsels the monastic virtues of poverty, celibacy, and obedience, which, though not obligatory, afford a superior means for attaining to the perfect life.[2]
In Thomas Aquinas we have the culmination and epitome of Scholasticism, "the crowning result of the great constructive effort of mediæval philosophy." The part which the jural view of morality plays in his ethical system illustrates very fairly the position of this view in Christian ethics in general. The Decalogue, with its never failing appeal to the moral consciousness, has been to Christians and to all who have come under the influence of Christianity the pre-eminent summary of moral principles; and, being expressed as the command of God, it has appeared as a moral law. Morality and obedience to the Ten Commandments are to many almost synonymous terms; and this fact, together with the other influences already mentioned, has given a prominently jural form to the ethics of the Church in modern times as well as in the Middle Ages.
Mediæval philosophy was characterized by submission to
