though it cannot be said that they were formally and avowedly at
conflict with the Casuists, the origin and object of their system were
nevertheless essentially different from those of Casuistry. It is
necessary to call attention to this difference, because it involves
the question of the influence of Roman law on that department of
thought with which both systems are concerned. The book of Grotius,
though it touches questions of pure Ethics in every page, and though
it is the parent immediate or remote of innumerable volumes of formal
morality, is not, as is well known, a professed treatise on Moral
Philosophy; it is an attempt to determine the Law of Nature, or
Natural Law. Now, without entering upon the question, whether the
conception of a Law Natural be not exclusively a creation of the Roman
jurisconsults, we may lay down that, even on the admission of Grotius
himself, the dicta of the Roman jurisprudence as to what parts of
known positive law must be taken to be parts of the Law of Nature,
are, if not infallible, to be received at all events with the
profoundest respect. Hence the system of Grotius is implicated with
Roman law at its very foundation, and this connection rendered
inevitable--what the legal training of the writer would perhaps have
entailed without it--the free employment in every paragraph of
technical phraseology, and of modes of reasoning, defining, and
illustrating, which must sometimes conceal the sense, and almost
always the force and cogency, of the argument from the reader who is
unfamiliar with the sources whence they have been derived. On the
other hand, Casuistry borrows little from Roman law, and the views of
morality contended for have nothing whatever in common with the
undertaking of Grotius. All that philosophy of right and wrong which
has become famous, or infamous, under the name of Casuistry, had its
origin in the distinction between Mortal and Venial Sin. A natural
anxiety to escape the awful consequences of determining a particular
act to be mortally sinful, and a desire, equally intelligible, to
assist the Roman Catholic Church in its conflict with Protestantism by
disburthening it of an inconvenient theory, were the motives which
impelled the authors of the Casuistical philosophy to the invention of
an elaborate system of criteria, intended to remove immoral actions,
in as many cases as possible, out of the category of mortal offences,
and to stamp them as venial sins. The fa