stian,
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]

[Footnote 1: The edition of Melancthon's works by Bretschneider and
Bindseil gives the ethical treatises in vol. xvi. and the other
philosophical treatises in vol. xiii. (in part also in vols. xi. and xx.).]

[Footnote 2: Cf. C.v. Kaltenborn, _Die Vorlaeufer des Hugo Grotius_,
Leipsic, 1848.]

On the Catholic side, the Jesuits (the Order was founded in 1534, and
confirmed in 1540), on the one hand, revived the Pelagian theory of freedom
in opposition to the Luthero-Augustinian doctrine of the servitude of the
will, and, on the other, defended the natural origin of the state in a
(revocable) contract in opposition to its divine origin asserted by the
Reformers, and the sovereignty of the people even to the