y contending that the
code of Nature exists in the future and is the goal to which all civil
laws are moving, but this is to reverse the assumptions on which the
old theory rested, or rather perhaps to mix together two inconsistent
theories. The tendency to look not to the past but to the future for
types of perfection was brought into the world by Christianity.
Ancient literature gives few or no hints of a belief that the progress
of society is necessarily from worse to better.

But the importance of this theory to mankind has been very much
greater than its philosophical deficiencies would lead us to expect.
Indeed, it is not easy to say what turn the history of thought, and
therefore, of the human race, would have taken, if the belief in a law
natural had not become universal in the ancient world.

There are two special dangers to which law, and society which is held
together by law, appear to be liable in their infancy. One of them is
that law may be too rapidly developed. This occurred with the codes of
the more progressive Greek communities, which disembarrassed
themselves with astonishing facility from cumbrous forms of procedure
and needless terms of art, and soon ceased to attach any superstitious
value to rigid rules and prescriptions. It was not for the ultimate
advantage of mankind that they did so, though the immediate benefit
conferred on their citizens may have been considerable. One of the
rarest qualities of national character is the capacity for applying
and working out the law, as such, at the cost of constant miscarriages
of abstract justice, without at the same time losing the hope or the
wish that law may be conformed to a higher ideal. The Greek intellect,
with all its nobility and elasticity, was quite unable to confine
itself within the strait waistcoat of a legal formula; and, if we may
judge them by the popular courts of Athens, of whose working we possess
accurate knowledge, the Greek tribunals exhibited the strongest
tendency to confound law and fact. The remains of the Orators and the
forensic commonplaces preserved by Aristotle in his Treatise on
Rhetoric, show that questions of pure law were constantly argued on
every consideration which could possibly influence the mind of the
judges. No durable system of jurisprudence could be produced in this
way. A community which never hesitated to relax rules of written law
whenever they stood in the way of an ideally perfect decision on the
facts