PREFACE

THE civil law, the canon law and the common law are all rooted in the ancient world. The early civil law reaches back to the foundation of Rome, centuries before the birth of Christ. Contributions from times even more remote were made by commercial and political contact with Greece and Phoenicia.

The origin of the common law is lost in the untamed forests of ancient Germany. Transplanted to England in the fifth century, the common law has kept pace with Anglo-Saxon development, responded to the impulses of English liberty and spread to every continent and to the islands of the sea.

In the fourth century, when Rome had become totally autocratic, Constantine accepted the nascent hierarchy as a functionary of the Empire. Thereupon the beginnings of clerical law were embodied in the imperial constitutions. But the new status and power thus conferred upon the hierarchy proved to be only the first step to the dizzy heights of its commanding dominance in succeeding ages.

It quickly molded canon law into the bold expression of its autocratic purposes. Canons and decrees of the councils, together with the constitutions of the reigning pontiffs, prepared the ecclesiastical law to rival or supplant, and in some instances to lead, that of the Emperors who disappeared from the West at the nightfall of the Middle Ages.

From a thousand thrones the hierarchy administered the canon law in all western lands. The rise of the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century, at the instance of the Pope, greatly facilitated the joint reception accorded to the canon and civil law in Germany. In the very century when the pontifical sway was most absolute and extended, universities began to cover the continent and to round the canon law into a peerless instrument of political and diplomatic conquest.

Of the ultramontanism of Gregory VII, Innocent III and Boniface VIII the hierarchy can never be purged. The Council of Trent completely mobilized it against the civil and religious liberty born of the Reformation. While the civil and common law systems, responding to the popular will, adjusted themselves to the problems and ideals of progressive democracy, the canon law, fossilized by the claim of papal infallibility, stands as the rigid embodiment of medieval absolutism.

Never can the canon law dwell at peace with enlightened popular sovereignty. With its two hundred millions of subjects shackled by its blighting iron sway, it is the outstanding menace and irritant to civil authority. Such dual allegiance to the papal despotism and the democracies of the modern world is a bewildering political tragedy. Relief will come only when the Papacy is annihilated as a political power, its canon law universally set aside and held for naught, and all its membership, from the Pope to the humblest layman, made completely amenable to civil authority and to positive law.

G. O. N.
Washington City.