[284] It by no means follows that God does not will, and did not foreordain society in its wider organisation, according to the conditions and circumstances out of which it arose.
[285] Sir H. Maine says (p. 124):—“The points which lie on the surface of history are these: the eldest male parent—the eldest ascendant—is absolutely supreme in his household. His dominion extends to life and death, and is as unqualified over their children and their houses as over his slaves. The flocks and herds of the children are the flocks and herds of the father.” [This is not borne out by what we read of Abraham and Lot, Esau and Jacob—e.g., “But Lot also, who was with Abraham, had flocks of sheep, and herds and tents. Neither was the land able to bear them, that they might dwell together” (Gen. xiii.). “And the possessions of the parent, which he holds in a representative rather than a proprietary character, are equally divided at his death among his descendants in the first degree, the eldest son sometimes receiving a double share, under the name of birthright, but more generally endowed with no hereditary advantage beyond an honorary precedence.” The separation then commenced with the division of the inheritance; and whether it was ever an equal division, and not proportioned to the respective ages of the sons, or determined by other motives, or again, a division of different kinds of property, may be open to question; but at any rate a division took place, and a separation of families was consequent upon it. The division was not only the sign and token, but the efficient cause of the separation; and so not only the dispersion of families, but separate ownerships commenced with the descendants in the first degree.
[286] Compare Plato, “Leges;” Grote’s “Plato,” iii. 337.
[287] “In that old heathenism of the Roman world, into which it was the will of God that the Christian religion should be introduced by the apostles, there were then diverse and often conflicting elements. There was a good element, which came from God; there was a thoroughly bad element, which came from Satan; and there was a corrupt element, which was the fruit of the workings of unregenerate human nature upon society, and upon the objects of sense and intelligence with which man is placed in relation. The good element we see embodied in great part of the laws and institutions of the ancient world, as also in much of the literature, the poetry, the philosophy of Greece and Rome, which literature consequently—after having been purified, and as it were baptized—has always been used by the Christian Church in the education of her children. This element, I say, was originally the gift of God, the Author of nature, to man, the offspring of reason and conscience, the tradition of a society of which God was Himself the founder. It enshrined whatever fragments of primeval truth as to God, the world, and man himself, still lingered, in whatever shape, among the far-wandering children of Adam. St Paul alludes to this element (Acts xvii. 22); ... and his words altogether seem to imply that God watched over it, supported it and fostered it, as far as men were worthy of it, and that it might even have been expanded into a perfect system of natural religion and of reasonable virtue, had men been grateful enough to earn larger measures of grace from God, who left not Himself without witness in His daily providence, and was not far from ‘any one of His children.’”—“Four Sermons,” by the Rev. Henry J. Coleridge, S. J. Burns & Oates. 1869. P. 52. (48.)
[288] The word ‘νὸμος’ is found in the Hymn to Apollo, v. 20, attributed to Homer [the term θεμιστες also, v. 391]—and in Hesiod, Op. et Dies, v. 276.—Goguet, ii. 78. In the Hymn to Apollo it is only applied to song. The Greeks had the same word, however—viz. νομοι, as for laws, songs, and pastures—that is to say, the term law, νομος, is applied to the instrument of its transmission, and to what would then have been its most ordinary subject matter. This seems to me in evidence of its primitive use.
Take, moreover, the following passage in the First Book of the Iliad, v. 233:—
Ἀλλ’ ἐκ τοι ἐρεω, και ἐπι μεγαν ὄρκον ὀμοῦμαι
ναι μα τοδε σκῆπτρον, το μεν οὐποτε φυλλα καὶ ὀζους
φυσει, ἐπειδη πρὠτα τομην ἐν ὀρεσσι λελοιπεν,
οὐδ’ ἀναθηλησει· περι γαρ ῥα ἑ χαλκος ἐλεψε