ion and expansion. While this process went on, it was
inevitable that jurisprudence, though merely intended to be the
vehicle of thought, should communicate its colour to the thought
itself. The tinge received through contact with legal conceptions is
perfectly perceptible in the earliest ethical literature of the modern
world, and it is evident, I think, that the Law of Contract, based as
it is on the complete reciprocity and indissoluble connection of
rights and duties, has acted as a wholesome corrective to the
predispositions of writers who, if left to themselves, might have
exclusively viewed a moral obligation as the public duty of a citizen
in the Civitas Dei. But the amount of Roman Law in moral theology
becomes sensibly smaller at the time of its cultivation by the great
Spanish moralists. Moral theology, developed by the juridical method
of doctor commenting on doctor, provided itself with a phraseology of
its own, and Aristotelian peculiarities of reasoning and expression,
imbibed doubtless in great part from the Disputations on Morals in the
academical schools, take the place of that special turn of thought and
speech which can never be mistaken by any person conversant with the
Roman law. If the credit of the Spanish school of moral theologians
had continued, the juridical ingredient in ethical science would have
been insignificant, but the use made of their conclusions by the next
generation of Roman Catholic writers on these subjects almost entirely
destroyed their influence. Moral Theology, degraded into Casuistry,
lost all interest for the leaders of European speculation; and the new
science of Moral Philosophy, which was entirely in the hands of the
Protestants, swerved greatly aside from the path which the moral
theologians had followed. The effect was vastly to increase the
influence of Roman law on ethical inquiry.

Shortly[5] after the Reformation, we find two great schools of
thought dividing this class of subjects between them. The most
influential of the two was at first the sect of school known to us as
the Casuists, all of them in spiritual communion with the Roman
Catholic Church, and nearly all of them affiliated to one or other of
her religious orders. On the other side were a body of writers
connected with each other by a common intellectual descent from the
great author of the treatise _De Jure Belli et Pacis_, Hugo Grotius.
Almost all of the latter were adherents of the Reformation, and