outside of arguments and above them are facts in the form of official documents, civil and ecclesiastical, representing different periods of the history of the Church, that help to show how the prevailing notions and usages regarding Sunday have grown up and been fortified, and are, therefore, of general interest. These facts, which are established by full quotations from the original rescripts, are held to illustrate the real nature of the Sunday question of to-day, and to be fitted to guide to a way of dealing with it; for, the author says, "Every effort to remodel existing Sunday legislation, or to forecast its future, must be made in the light of the past." From the setting forth of the compilation, Dr. Lewis draws the conclusion that the first Sunday legislation was the product of that pagan conception of the Romans which made religion a department of the state. It appears in the form of an edict by Constantine as Pontifex Maximus, a. d. 321, ordering the observance of "the venerable day of the sun," in which no reference is made to Christianity. The first designation of this day of the sun as "the Lord's Day" appears sixty-five years later, or in a. d. 386, in connection with the mention of pagan and imperial holidays "baptized with new names and slightly modified. . . . During the middle ages Sunday legislation took on a more Judaistic type, under the plea of analogy, whereby civil authorities claimed the right to legislate in religious matters, after the manner of the Jewish theocracy." The Continental Reformation made little change in the civil legislation on the subject. The early Anglo-Saxon laws were historically, and therefore, probably, logically, the product of the middle age legislation of the "Holy Roman Empire." "The English laws are an expansion of the Saxon, and the American are a transcript of the English." Thus the author believes that he traces a historic continuity in the legislation from paganism till to-day. "In the Sunday legislation of the Roman Empire, the religious element was subordinate to the civil. In the middle ages, under Cromwell, and during our colonial period, the Church was practically supreme." Any claim that Sunday legislation is not based on religious ground "is contradicted by the facts of all the centuries. Every Sunday law sprang from a religious sentiment"; originally pagan, then gradually modified by the interweaving of the Christian idea of commemorating Christ's resurrection; then in the middle ages making a substitution of Sunday for the Sabbath of the Jewish theocracy. The historical review concludes with analyses of the Sunday laws of the several United States. While argument on Sunday legislation is not intended, the bearing of the book is against it as not being a function of political government; except so far as to preserve civil order, and particularly to repress the liquor traffic on the day, the leisure of which gives so many opportunities for rioting and criminality.
Principles and Practice of Morality. By Ezekiel Gilman Robinson. Boston: De Silver, Rogers & Co. Pp. 264. Price, $1.50.
This treatise is designed as a text-book, and has grown out of the lectures which the author—who is President of Brown University—has given to his classes in ethics, when no existing text-book was found sufficient for the occasion. Ethical theories have been modified to a marked degree by the exhaustive discussions to which they have been subjected in recent years; and the resultant changes do not pass unobserved in the treatise, but are kept in mind when not formally referred to. Yet existing controversies are touched upon only so far as is necessary for the elucidation or defense of the positions here taken. Distinction is made between the science and the philosophy of ethics, the former being regarded as that which teaches what is moral, the latter as illustrating why it is moral. This brings up the consideration of the sources of moral obligation, or, as the author expresses it, with some originality of language, "the origin of the feeling of oughtness," to which considerable prominence is given, and in the discussion of which may be found the central point of Dr. Robinson's theory. The later theories on this subject—designated as the Hegelian, which makes the standard one of general contemporary recognition, or conventional; the evolutionary, which supposes it to have been developed or evolved; and the historical, which assumes it to be the fruit of experience—are declared insufficient to account for it. While the last two
